Control of Serial Rigid Link Manipulators with Hyper Degrees of Freedom

In this paper, a new shape control law is proposed to bring a serial rigid link manipulator with hyper degrees of freedom into a specified curve. A shape control is one of the most fundamental controls for a hyper degrees of freedom manipulator. This control law is derived from the point of view of decreasing a certain energy function based on its dynamics. The concept of a homogeneously decentralized control scheme is also proposed for the practical application of the control law to the hyper degrees of freedom manipulator, and it is shown that the derived control law can be realized in a homogeneously decentralized control scheme. The effectiveness of this control law is verified by not only computer simulations but also hardware model experiments.