Velocity field control of robot manipulators by using only position measurements

In the velocity field control approach the robot motions are specified through a vectorial function that assigns the desired velocity to each point of the configuration space. In other words, a velocity field defines the robot desired velocity in the operational space as a function of its current position. In this paper is introduced a new algorithm to solve the velocity field control formulation in the robot operational space. The proposed approach assumes only joint position measurements and is based on a hierarchical structure that results of using the kinematic control concept and a joint velocity controller. To estimate the joint velocity, nonlinear filtering of the joint position is used.