A Multi Objective Control Approach to Online Dual Arm Manipulation

In this paper, we propose a new way to exploit the redundancy of dual arm mobile manipulators when performing inherently bi-manual tasks using online controllers. Bi-manual tasks are tasks that require motion of both arms in order to be carried out efficiently, such as holding and cleaning an object, or moving an object from one hand to the other. These tasks are often associated with several constraints, such as singularityand collision avoidance, but also a high degree of redundancy, as the relative positions of the two grippers is far more important than the absolute positions, when for example handing an object from one arm to the other. By applying a modular multi objective control framework, inspired by earlier work on sub-task control, we exploit this redundancy to form a subset of the joint space that is feasible, i.e. not violating any of the constraints. Earlier approacher added the additional tasks in terms of equality constraints, thereby reducing the dimension of the feasible subset until it was a single point. Here however, we add the additional tasks in terms of inequalities, removing parts of the feasible set rather than collapsing its dimensionality. Thus, we are able to handle an arbitrary number of constraints, instead of a number corresponding to the dimension of the feasible set (degree of redundancy). Finally, inside the feasible set we choose controls stay in the set, while simultaneously minimizing some given objective. The proposed approach is illustrated by several simulation examples.