A parallel algorithm and architecture for the control of kinematically redundant manipulators

The authors present a parallel algorithm for solving the equations of motion for kinematically redundant robotic systems. This algorithm, which relies on the calculation of the singular value decomposition (SVD), is implemented on a simple linear array of processing elements. By taking advantage of the error bounds on the perturbation of the SVD, it is shown that an array of only four AT&T DSP (digital signal processor) chips can result in control cycle times of less than 3 ms for a seven degree-of-freedom manipulator