Optimal Redundancy Control of Robot Manipulators

This paper discusses the optimal redundancy control problem of robot manipulators. The redundancy control problem has mostly been discussed in the framework of instantaneously optimal control. In this paper, the globally optimal redun dancy control problem is solved strictly by using Pontryagin's maximum principle. According to the proposed method, the optimal trajectory is necessarily obtained if it evists. If only kinematics is considered, the optimal problem is reduced to minimal value searching in a space of as many dimensions as the degrees of redundancy. If dynamics is also taken into consideration, the optimal problem is reduced to minimum value searching in a space of twice as many dimensions as the degrees of redundancy.