Switching Manipulator Control for Motion on Constrained Surfaces

We develop non-smooth motion controllers that enable a manipulator to perform surface tasks that do not involve force/torque interactions, while maintaining bounded joint rates. The robot’s end-effector is first stabilized to a point close to the surface, and then it tracks a trajectory on the surface, while avoiding certain prescribed regions. We show that the resulting closed loop system is uniformly asymptotically stable, and we verify our analytical development with experiments on a Mitsubishi PA10-7C robotic manipulator.