OPERATIONAL SPACE CONTROL OF COMPLEX MODULAR ROBOTIC STRUCTURES VIA DP BASED KINEMATIC INVERSION TECHNIQUES

The work deals with modular complex kinematic chains governed by an embedded distributed control system. More precisely, every joint of is assumed equipped with a simple local processing unit for properly driving its motion. As a consequence, each one of them plus the associated link is considered as a defective “1-dof only” separately controlled atomic manipulator, which is required to act in team with all the others, in order to accomplish to a common task specified in the operational space. In this framework the paper proposes a computationally distributed kinematic inversion technique that, via the on-line application of dynamic programming (based on a moderate data exchange among the processing units), allows the establishment of a global self-organizing behaviour; thus allowing the task execution by solely exploiting the control capabilities of each local processing unit, while also not requiring any acknowledge about the overall structure geometry and kinematics.