On Maximizing Manipulability Index while Solving a Kinematics Task
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On Maximizing Manipulability Index while Solving a Kinematics Task Kévin Dufour 1,2 & Wael Suleiman 1,2 Received: 6 November 2019 / Accepted: 3 February 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this paper, we investigate the problem of maximizing the manipulability index while solving a general Inverse Kinematics (IK) problem of a redundant industrial manipulator. Manipulability index has been extensively studied in the robotics literature and several formulae have been developed, nevertheless, they mainly only exploit the robot redundancy. The general IK is formulated as a Quadratic Programming (QP) that can seamlessly incorporate inequality constraints, such as collision avoidance, and we propose two new formulae to integrate the manipulability index maximization into the QP-based IK solver. We then thoroughly analyze the performance of the proposed formulae in simulation and validate them on a real Baxter research robot. The experimental results revealed the outperformance of the proposed formulae in comparison with the classical formula in the literature. Hence, providing a way to improve the manipulability index of a recorded trajectory, e.g. by learning by demonstration, or an offline generated one by a motion planning algorithm. Keywords Manipulability index . Inverse kinematics . QP-based IK solver . Collision avoidance
1 Introduction Collaborative robots (cobots) and their applications in manufacturing are very promising, as they are expected to allow small and medium-sized enterprises to regain competitiveness and efficiency thanks to the flexibility of their deployment. Cobots market is forecasted to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 52.45% to reach 3 Billion USD by 2022 [2]. A major concern, however, is the safety of human operators of cobots. This is mainly because those robots operate without the conventional security fences usually used to separate heavy and dangerous industrial robots from humans, they are even designed to physically collaborate with humans to accomplish some tasks. To tackle the safety issue, several approaches have been proposed: I)- modifying the mechanical design of the robots and their material [3] or the actuation Wael Suleiman A preliminary version of this paper has been presented at 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017) and published in [1]. * Wael Suleiman [email protected] 1
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, University of Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada
2
Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Innovation Technologique (3IT), University of Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada
mechanisms [4–6], II)- adding a software layer to monitor the whole system to make it more human-friendly [7], III)considering the safety criterion as an additional constraint in the planning and execution phases of the task. Dealing with a dynamic environment while ensuring the safety of humans or not damaging the robot is also another challenging issue. A possible way to deal with this problem i
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