Task-Space Position and Containment Control of Redundant Manipulators with Bounded Inputs

This note presents a novel approach for task-space tracking control of redundant manipulators with bounded actuation. Inspired by the leader-follower containment problem in multi-agent systems, the proposed controller is utilized to address the containment control of a single follower manipulator led by multiple manipulators. In the controller design, the redundancy of the robots is exploited for achieving sub-task control such as singularity avoidance, and joint limit avoidance. The asymptotic stability condition for the closed-loop dynamics is obtained using Lyapunov functional. For the containment, the proposed controller makes sure that the leaders track their desired positions and the follower robot’s end-effector asymptotically converges to the convex hull formed by the leaders’ traversed trajectories. The efficiency of the proposed control algorithm is verified through numerical simulations and experimental results.