Fault-Tolerant Kinematic Controller Design for Underactuated Robot Manipulators

The trajectory generation problem for fault-tolerant robot manipulators is considered. A new technique which extends the Inverse Kinematics optimization approach to the case of robots with actuator faults is proposed. A bound on the second-order non-integrable constraints resulting from underactuation is assumed, and the trajectory generation problem is formulated as a nonlinear time-varying stabilization problem which is solved in parallel with the optimization technique in real time. Based on the performance of the proposed trajectory generator, a new measure is introduced to monitor the reliability of the robot manipulator in this case. Simulation studies are presented to illustrate the proposed design.