Redundancy Resolution by Minimization of Joint Disturbance Torque for Independent Joint Controlled Kinematically Redundant Manipulators

Majority of industrial robots are controlled by a simple independent joint control of joint actuators rather than complex controllers based on the nonlinear dynamic model of the robot manipulator. In this independent joint control scheme, the performance of actuator control is influenced significantly by the joint disturbance torques including gravity, Coriolis and centrifugal torques, which result in the trajectory tracking error in the joint control system. The control performance of a redundant manipulator under independent joint control can be improved by minimizing this joint disturbance torque in resolving the kinematic redundancy. A 3 DOF planar robot is studied as an example, and the dynamic programming method is used to find the globally optimal joint trajectory that minimize the joint disturbance torque over the entire motion. The resulting solution is compared with the solution obtained by the conventional joint torque minimization, and it is shown that joint disturbance can be reduced using the kinematic redundancy.