Compliant motion controllers for kinematically redundant manipulators

The problem of compliant motion control using a redundant manipulator is addressed in this article. Specifically, a hybrid-control type and impedance-control type controllers are extended to general redundant manipulators based on the kinematically decomposed and geometrically compatible modeling of its joint space. In the case of the hybrid controller, it leads to the linear and decoupled closed-loop dynamics in the three motion spaces, that is the motion-controlled, force-controlled, and the null motion-controlled spaces of the redundant manipulator. When the proposed impedance controller is applied, the decoupled impedance models in three motion spaces are obtained. The superiority of the proposed controllers is verified with the numerical experiments.