Minimum energy control of redundant actuation machine tools

In redundant manipulation of machine tools the number of actuators (motors) exceeds the number of degrees of freedom of the end-effector motion. As a result, the end-effector path does not completely determine the trajectories of all the individual degrees of freedom. The redundancy can be used to enhance the performance in a desired sense, e.g. manoeuvring time. This work focuses on minimizing energy consumption. Optimal control theory is used to find the optimal distribution of the motion between the actuators, under physical limitations, for a given end-effector path. Simulation results show a considerable reduction in energy consumption.