A Model-free Redundancy Resolution Technique for Visual Motor Coordination of a 6 DOF robot manipulator

In this paper, visual motor coordination of a 6 DOF robot manipulator is considered. It is difficult to analytically derive inverse kinematic relationships for such manipulators. The problem becomes more challenging owing to the presence of multiple solutions for the inverse-kinematic relationship between robot end-effector position and joint angle vector. Many of the current redundancy resolution techniques necessitate explicit orientation information which cannot be obtained from visual feedback. Hence such techniques cannot be used for visual motor coordination of redundant manipulators. In this paper, it is demonstrated that a feasible inverse kinematic solution may be obtained by using input-output space clustering along with the KSOM algorithm. The method is innovative in the sense that it does not require any orientation information for resolving redundancy and it is model-independent. The efficacy of the proposed method is illustrated through simulations on a 6 DOF PUMA 560 manipulator model.