Dynamic control of curve-constrained hyper-redundant manipulators

Hyper-redundant manipulators have large number of kinematic degrees of freedom, thus possessing some unconventional features such as the ability to enter a narrow space while avoiding obstacles. To control these hyper-redundant manipulators accurately, the manipulator dynamics must be included into consideration. This is however time-expensive and makes implementation of the real-time control difficult. In this paper, we propose a dynamic control scheme for hyper-redundant manipulators, which is based on analysis in the defined posture space where three parameters were used to determine the manipulator posture. The manipulator dynamics is modeled in the parameterized form with the parameter of the posture space path and the posture space path-tracking feedforward controller is formulated on the basis of the parameterized dynamic equation. Computer simulation was executed to show the validity of the proposed technique, where a hyper-redundant manipulator traces the posture space path well by the proposed feedforward controller. As a result, it is proven that the hyper-redundant manipulator can track the workspace path accurately.