Distributed Motion Control for Multiple Robotic Manipulators

This paper presents a method for coordinating the motion of multiple manipulators that share a common workspace. The approach employs independent motion controllers for each manipulator coupled by way of common configuration space constraints --- each robot is represented as a constraint in the other configuration spaces. The harmonic function-based controller for each robot guarantees collision-free motion up to dynamic limits. Heuristic constraints are introduced to compensate for the lack of global information in the resulting distributed controller. The relationship between the distributed controller and the task planner is discussed and results of an experimental implementation are presented. 1 Introduction The complexity of motion planning for multiple robotic systems grows exponentially as the number of degrees of freedom of the system increases. For this reason, it is clearly advantageous to decouple the control of multiple manipulators. In such systems, the manipulators ofte..