A new article entitled “Tool center point control of a large-scale manipulator using absolute position feedback” will be published in the February 2023 issue (vol. 131) of Control Engineering Practice's.
Highlights
- Trajectory generation for absolute pose of large-scale manipulators with constraints.
- Robotic total station measurements yield sub-centimetre positioning accuracy.
- Inverse kinematics is solved online by constrained quadratic optimisation.
- Time-optimal solution is 1.53 times faster for the case studied, but solved offline.
Abstract
This work presents a trajectory generation and control scheme for point-to-point motion of a hydraulically driven large-scale manipulator considering various constraints such as joint position, joint velocity, task space, and volumetric flow rate constraints. Trajectories for the absolute position and orientation of the tool center point are generated by a constrained quadratic optimization problem based on differential kinematics. The use of an efficient quadratic problem solver renders the algorithm real-time capable. The control loop uses a high-quality measurement feedback in Cartesian coordinates from a robotic total station network to precisely position the tool center point. The proposed control scheme is compared to a time-optimal solution in simulations. Simulations further show the redundancy exploitation and robustness of the algorithm. Experiments give insight into the tracking quality and show that the achieved positioning accuracy is in the sub-centimeter range.
Congratulations to Anja Lauer, Otto Lerke, Boris Blagojevic, Volker Schwieger and Oliver Sawodny!
More information on the article here.