Dual-arm cooperative manipulation under joint limit constraints

Cooperative manipulation of a rigid object is challenging and represents an interesting and active research area, especially when these robots are subject to joint and task prioritization constraints. In cooperative manipulation, a primary task is to maintain the coordination of motions, to avoid severe damage caused by the violation of kinematic constraints imposed by the closed chain mechanism. This paper proposes a kinematic controller for dual-arm cooperative manipulation that ensures safety by providing relative coordinated motion as highest priority task and joint limit avoidance and world-space trajectory following at a lower priority. The coordination of motions is based on modular relative Jacobian formulation. The approach is applicable to systems composed of redundant or non-redundant manipulators. Experiments in simulation demonstrate the behavior of the approach under different redundancy configurations. Experiments on two robots with different number of redundant motions show the applicability of the proposed approach to cooperative manipulation under joint limit constraints.