A Computationally Distributed Self-Organizing Algorithm for the Control of Manipulators in the Operational Space

The present work deals with manipulator arms characterized by the presence of an internal, totally distributed, embedded control system. More specifically, every single joint is assumed to be equipped with a simple local processing unit devoted to properly drive its motion, thus allowing to consider each pair constituted by a single joint and the associated link as a defective “1-dof-only”, separately controlled, atomic manipulator. In this perspective, the paper proposes an effective, computationally distributed, control technique that, based on a repeated data exchange among the processing units, establishes a global self-organizing behaviour among the joints which allows to control the motion of the end-effector of the overall arm in the operational space, by solely exploiting the control capabilities of every local processing unit, while not requiring any centralized global knowledge about the overall arm geometry and kinematics.