A Varied Weights Method for the Kinematic Control of Redundant Manipulators With Multiple Constraints

A varied weights (VW) method is proposed in this paper for the kinematic control of redundant manipulators with multiple constraints. A weight factor rule to reflect the transition of the state of constraint subtask between activeness and inactiveness is presented. Each constraint has a VW factor in such a way that every time only the main task and the active constraint subtasks are considered. A new concept of effective singular value is presented for the design of damping factors to avoid the pseudosingularity arising from the transition of weight factors. The experiments on the seven-degree-of-freedom (7-DOF) Ping-Pong manipulator illustrate the efficacy of the proposed VW method.