Dynamic DOF assignment through interaction with environment

To control a robot that has many degrees of freedom and various sensors, a method to dynamically assign the degrees for a task is proposed. First, a mechanism to estimate the relation between the sensor inputs and the control outputs is derived based on the least-mean-square method. Then, by observing the information matrix of the estimator, a method to find robot's redundancy with respect to a given task is derived. Applying the proposed scheme to the visual servoing task of a manipulator, we show several experimental results demonstrating that the method can find redundancy automatically, and can assign the redundant degrees to another task.