Distributed formation control of end-effector of mixed planar fully- and under-actuated manipulators

TL;DR

This paper develops a distributed control method for the end-effector formation of a mixed group of fully-actuated and underactuated planar manipulators, ensuring convergence to desired formations through stability analysis and simulations.

Contribution

It extends existing formation control to include underactuated manipulators by leveraging their integrability, providing stability analysis and validation.

Findings

End-effector converges to the desired formation shape

Stability of the closed-loop system is proven under certain conditions

Simulation results validate the proposed control approach

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of end-effector formation control for a mixed group of two-link manipulators moving in a horizontal plane that comprises of fully-actuated manipulators and underactuated manipulators with only the second joint being actuated (referred to as the passive-active (PA) manipulators). The problem is solved by extending the distributed end-effector formation controller for the fully-actuated manipulator to the PA manipulator moving in a horizontal plane by using its integrability. This paper presents stability analysis of the closed-loop systems under a given necessary condition, and we prove that the manipulators' end-effector converge to the desired formation shape. The proposed method is validated by simulations.