Obstacle avoidance of manipulators with rate constraints

The paper presents a new control method which achieves autonomous obstacle avoidance for manipulators with rate constraints. More precisely, in order to achieve the autonomous obstacle avoidance, we exploit the freedom of the coordinate transformation for exact linearization of nonlinear systems. At the same time, we cope with the rate constraints by adopting the statedependent time scale transformation. Furthermore, we apply this method to an actual 2-link robot manipulator, and evaluate its effectiveness by experiment, which is the most important part of the paper.