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Chapter 39 — Cooperative Manipulation

Fabrizio Caccavale and Masaru Uchiyama

This chapter is devoted to cooperative manipulation of a common object by means of two or more robotic arms. The chapter opens with a historical overview of the research on cooperativemanipulation, ranging from early 1970s to very recent years. Kinematics and dynamics of robotic arms cooperatively manipulating a tightly grasped rigid object are presented in depth. As for the kinematics and statics, the chosen approach is based on the socalled symmetric formulation; fundamentals of dynamics and reduced-order models for closed kinematic chains are discussed as well. A few special topics, such as the definition of geometrically meaningful cooperative task space variables, the problem of load distribution, and the definition of manipulability ellipsoids, are included to give the reader a complete picture ofmodeling and evaluation methodologies for cooperative manipulators. Then, the chapter presents the main strategies for controlling both the motion of the cooperative system and the interaction forces between the manipulators and the grasped object; in detail, fundamentals of hybrid force/position control, proportional–derivative (PD)-type force/position control schemes, feedback linearization techniques, and impedance control approaches are given. In the last section further reading on advanced topics related to control of cooperative robots is suggested; in detail, advanced nonlinear control strategies are briefly discussed (i. e., intelligent control approaches, synchronization control, decentralized control); also, fundamental results on modeling and control of cooperative systems possessing some degree of flexibility are briefly outlined.

Cooperative grasping and transportation of objects using multiple UAVs

Author  Daniel Mellinger, Michael Shomin, Nathan Michael, Vijay Kumar

Video ID : 66

This video shows experiments on cooperative grasping and transportation of objects using multiple UAVs equipped with grippers.

Impedance control for cooperative manipulators

Author  Fabrizio Caccavale, Pasquale Chiacchio, Alessandro Marino, Luigi Villani

Video ID : 67

This is a video showing experiments on impedance control for cooperative manipulators. Reference: F. Caccavale, P. Chiacchio, A. Marino, L. Villani: Six-DOF impedance control of dual-arm cooperative manipulators, IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatron. 13, 576-586 (2008).

Cooperative capturing via flexible manipulators

Author  Masaru Uchiyama

Video ID : 68

This is a video showing cooperative capturing of a spinning object via flexible manipulators. Reference: T. Miyabe, M. Yamano, A. Konno, M. Uchiyama: An approach towards a robust object recovery with flexible manipulators, Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intel. Robot. Syst. (2001) pp. 907-912.

Cooperative grasping and transportation of an object using two industrial manipulators

Author  Francesco Basile, Fabrizio Caccavale, Pasquale Chiacchio, Jolanda Coppola, Alessandro Marino

Video ID : 69

This video shows an example of cooperative grasping and transportation of an object using two industrial manipulators. A two-layer hierarchical, kinematic control is adopted, based on a suitable task formulation for general multi-arm systems. Reference: F. Basile, F. Caccavale, P. Chiacchio, J. Coppola, A. Marino: A decentralized kinematic control architecture for collaborative and cooperative multi-arm systems, Mechatronics, 23, 1100-1112 (2013).

Control of cooperative manipulators in the operational space

Author  Oussama Khatib

Video ID : 70

This video shows a series of experiments on operational space control of cooperative manipulators. Both the virtual linkage and augmented object concepts are experimentally demonstrated, together with cooperative manipulation via multiple mobile arms (Romeo & Juliet).