A unified theory for hybrid control of manipulators

Reciprocity-based task decomposition is established as a unified theory for the hybrid control of robots. All aspects of the decomposition are comprehensively interpreted to provide an unambiguous description of the force and motion constraints in a constrained motion task. The decomposition which is based on sets of screws and a corresponding indefinite inner product, is the most general and mathematically consistent task description for the hybrid control of robots. The authors also show that the prevalent theory of hybrid control is a misinterpretation of a special case of the general theory they describe. As a step toward designing hybrid controllers, the results are used to decompose the manipulator dynamics to obtain suitable equations of motion