Multi-Priority Reactive Motion Control for Safe and Coordinated Dual-Arm Manipulation in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Reactive motion generation for dual-arm robotic systems is challenging due to their high degrees of freedom, nonlinear characteristics as well as the presence of multiple constraints, including kinematic limits, collision avoidance, dual-arm coordination, and other task-specific requirements. These constraints may become incompatible especially in dynamic operational scenarios. This letter presents a multi-priority reactive motion control framework to address the above challenges. First, a novel time-varying control barrier function leveraging multi-body distance blending is proposed to formulate dynamic whole-body collision avoidance constraint. Then, a constraint prioritization mechanism is introduced to incorporate multiple task objectives into a single optimization-based controller, where the constraints are resolved in strict order of priority using hierarchical quadratic programming. The proposed control framework is extensively validated in both simulations and real-world experiments, with results consistently demonstrating its ability to generate both safe and coordinated reactive motions across various dual-arm collaboration tasks.