Control of serial rigid link manipulators with hyper degrees of freedom: shape control by a homogeneously decentralized scheme and its experiment

In this paper, a new shape control law is proposed to bring a serial rigid link manipulator with hyper degrees of freedom into a specified shape. Shape control is one of the most characteristic controls for a hyper degrees of freedom manipulator. This control law is derived by the Lyapunov design method. A homogeneously decentralized control scheme is also proposed for practical application of the control law to a hyper degrees of freedom manipulator, and it is shown that the derived control law can be realized in a homogeneously decentralized control scheme. The effectiveness of this control law is verified by a hardware model experiment.