Dynamic control of redundant manipulators using the artificial potential field approach with time scaling

This paper proposes a new method for the dynamic control of redundant manipulators via the artificial potential field approach. In the artificial potential field approach, the goal is represented by an artificial attractive potential field and the obstacles by corresponding repulsive field, so that the trajectory to the target can be associated with the unique flow-line of the gradient field through the initial position and can be generated via a flow-line tracking process. This approach is suitable for real-time motion planning because of its simplicity and smaller computational time than other methods based on global information about the task space. However, little attention has been paid to the control of the dynamic behavior of the trajectories generated. The proposed method is based on the artificial potential field approach with a combination of a time-scale transformation and a time-base generator which works as a time-scale compressor and can control the dynamic behavior of the robot without any change in the form of the designed controller itself. It can also be applied to the dynamic motion planning problem of redundant manipulators. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by computer simulations for a three-joint planar manipulator.