Task-Priority F ormulations f or t he Kinematic Control o f Highly R edundant Articulated S tructures

Statement of the problem In this paper we compare two formulations for the kine- matic control of redundant manipulators, based on task prioritization. We also propose an incremental method to speed up the evaluation of the solution. This is especially interesting when dealing with multiple task-priority levels and with highly redundant structures. Finally, the effective- ness of the approach in the context of posture control of human-& articulated figures is illustrated. Let q be the joint coordinate vector of an n-DOFs articu- lated structure. The kinematic behavior can be completely specified through Inverse Kinematics with : an arb- nu mber. sav t. o ftasks(T 121, with an order of priority (Ti has priority over Ti+l). A task con- trols location and/or orientation of one or more end- effectors simultaneously, and is defined by an ml-dimen- sional velocity vector in task-space xi as well as an mixn Jacobian matrix Ji (relating unit joint velocities to the end-effector@) task velocity);