A new controller design scheme for cooperating manipulators - a reliable design approach

A new controller design framework for cooperating manipulators is considere d in this paper based on a reliable controller design concept. The objectiv e of this paper is to derive a set of controllers for cooperating manipulat ors, particularly those that can hand over an object. The key idea is to re formulate the original problem of coordinated control as a reliable stabili zation problem, i.e. to design a set of controllers which can stabilize a p lant both jointly and alone. By introducing a kind of strict force control scheme in the workspace, the reliably stabilizing controller design techniq ue is applied to derive the controllers. Two contributions exist: (i) clari fying a class of the object which can be handed over by using the proposed control scheme and (ii) presenting a constructive design method of the cont rollers. Experimental results on the hand-over control of a spherical inver ted pendulum with two 6 d.o.f. manipulators are included.