Experiments of kinematic control on a redundant robot manipulator with nonspherical wrist

This article reports the results of an experimental investigation of real-time kinematic control on a seven-joint industrial robot manipulator having a nonspherical wrist. Closed-loop inverse kinematics algorithms are utilized, namely, an algorithm based on the manipulator geometric Jacobian and a two-stage algorithm based on analytical Jacobians of reduced dimensions. A damped least-squares technique with varying damping factor is adopted to provide numerical robustness of the solution in the neighborhood of kinematic singularities. Redundancy is solved by employing an augmented task space approach with task priority. Case studies are developed to compare the performance of the two algorithms. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.