Coordinating multilimbed robots for generating large Cartesian force

The coordination of the arm and main body of multilimbed robots to generate large Cartesian forces is discussed. Two methods are developed. In the first method, motions for the arm and main body are separately considered. For a given Cartesian force, an optimal configuration is determined for the arm. Based on the arm configuration, the main body is adjusted to satisfy the constraints of the position and orientation of the end-effector. To reduce the energy consumption, the nonlinear programming techniques could be further applied to the main body to obtain an optimal configuration. The second method treats the multilimbed robot as a single system and directly applies the nonlinear programming technique to the arm and main body with the arm torque limitation as an added set of constraints. Since the multilimbed robot is considered as a single system, the method had the least sense of coordination and is computationally more complicated than the first method