A NUMERICAL METHOD OF PREDRTERMINED OPTIMAL RESOLUTION FOR A REDUNDANT MANIPULATOR

This paper proposes a numerical method for redundant manipulators using predetermined optimal resolution. In order to obtain optimal joint trajectories, it is desirable to formulate redundancy resolution as an optimization problem having an integral cost criterion. We predetermine the trajectories of redundant joints in terms of the Nth partial sum of the Fourier series, which lead to the solution in the desirable homotopy class. Then optimal coefficients of the Fourier series, which yield the optimal solution within the predetermined class, are searched by the Powell's method. The proposed method is applied to a 3-link planar manipulator for cyclic tasks in Cartesian space. As the results, we can obtain the optimal solution in the desirable homotopy class without topological liftings of the solution. To show the validity of the proposed method, we analyze both optimal and extremal solutions by the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and discuss joint trajectories on the phase plane.