Modeling and Control of Dual Arm Robotic Manipulators using Decentralized Navigation Functions

We apply multi-agent systems’ techniques to the control of dual arm robotic manipulators. The paper is divided into two separate subproblems: the first one considers decentralized navigation of a non-holonomic two-agent system with collision avoidance, corresponding to the end effectors of the robotic arms. For this problem, a controller that guarantees convergence to an arbitrarily small region around the desired destination is proposed. The second subproblem considers decentralized connectivity preserving control of a holonomic multi-agent system of fingers associated with the end effectors. Here, the goal is to account for the angle constraints that are necessary to describe the relationship between fingers connected to the same hand. For this case, both connectivity and convergence are shown with the proposed controller.