Collision-Free Compliance Control for Redundant Manipulators: An Optimization Case

Force control of manipulators could enhance compliance and execution capabilities, and has become a key issue in the field of robotic control. However, it is challenging for redundant manipulators, especially when there exist risks of collisions. In this paper, we propose a collision-free compliance control strategy based on recurrent neural networks. Inspired by impedance control, the position-force control task is rebuilt as a reference command of task-space velocities, by combing kinematic properties, the compliance controller is then described as an equality constraint in joint velocity level. As to collision avoidance strategy, both robot and obstacles are approximately described as two sets of key points, and the distances between those points are used to scale the feasible workspace. In order to save unnecessary energy consumption while reducing impact of possible collisions, the secondary task is chosen to minimize joint velocities. Then a RNN with provable convergence is established to solve the constraint-optimization problem in realtime. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.