using momentum conservation to control kinematically redundant manipulators

A control scheme for the coordination of motion in a macro-micro manipulator system is presented. The motion of the end-effector is decoupled from the rest of the system using resolved acceleration control, while a slow, gross positioning is used for the macro part. To avoid saturated inputs and excessive use of energy for systems with limited fuel, the end effector is not decoupled from macro part motion, but from selected directions of the linear momentum of the total system. For the vehicle-manipulator case, the end-effector is decoupled also from the angular momentum. This leads to lower force and torque peaks in the actuators, and control force is used on the macro part only when it is necessary to reposition this to keep the micro part inside its workspace.