Natural Resolution of DOF Redundancy in Execution of Robot Tasks;Stability on a Constraint Manifold

In order to enhance dexterity in execution of robot tasks, a redundant number of degrees-of-freedom (DOF) is adopted for design of robotic mechanisms like robot arms and multi-fingered robot hands. Associated with such redundancy in the number of DOFs relative to the number of physical variables necessary and sufficient for description of a given task, an extra performance index is introduced for controlling such a redundant robot in order to avoid arising of an ill-posed problem of inverse kinematics from the task space to the joint space. This paper shows that such an ill-posedness of DOF redundancy can be resolved in a natural way by using a novel concept named “stability on a manifold”. To show this, two illustrative robot tasks 1) robotic handwriting and 2) control of an object posture via rolling contact by a multi-DOF finger are analyzed in details.