Improving Redundancy Availability: Dynamic Subtasks Modulation for Robots with Redundancy Insufficiency

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic subtask merging strategy for robots with limited redundancy, enhancing their ability to handle complex tasks with multiple constraints without interference.

Contribution

It proposes a novel method for improving redundancy availability through dynamic subtask modulation and merging, ensuring efficient task execution under redundancy constraints.

Findings

Significantly improves redundancy resolution efficiency.

Effectively manages multiple subtasks without interference.

Validated through two case studies demonstrating performance gains.

Abstract

This work presents an approach for robots to suitably carry out complex applications characterized by the presence of multiple additional constraints or subtasks (e.g. obstacle and self-collision avoidance) but subject to redundancy insufficiency. The proposed approach, based on a novel subtask merging strategy, enforces all subtasks in due course by dynamically modulating a virtual secondary task, where the task status and soft priority are incorporated to improve the overall efficiency of redundancy resolution. The proposed approach greatly improves the redundancy availability by unitizing and deploying subtasks in a fine-grained and compact manner. We build up our control framework on the null space projection, which guarantees the execution of subtasks does not interfere with the primary task. Experimental results on two case studies are presented to show the performance of our approach.