A feasible work-piece placement method for contact-type operations

A method to find a feasible work-piece location for a given desired task-space trajectory is presented in this paper. By making use of the operational space control framework [1], this paper proposes a method to assist the search of the work-piece location with respect to the robot in such a way that the path reachability is always guaranteed. The method proposed in this work does not require the solutions of the inverse kinematics problem, thus, this method is expected to have more flexibility and generality in practice. In addition, since the internal robot posture can be controlled through the null-space controller, optimization of the work-piece placement could be achieved by imposing artificial constrains at the robot joints/links. Simulation is provided to show the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.