Impact Reduction for Unknown Environment Using Kinematic Redundancy

In this article, a new performance index is proposed to re-duce the collision impulsive force by controlling the null motion of redundant manipulators. First, we define the normalized impact ellipsoid in the viewpoint of instantaneous velocity change. Then, we propose a new impact performance index based on velocity direction for null motion to reduce initial impulsive effects. It gives some advantage for the case of unknown environment. The optimization of this index is that the successional impact forces are reduced. The performance of the proposed index is demonstrated by simulation study.