Control of a macro-micro robot system using manipulability of the micro robot

A 3'DOF robot finger is fixed to the end-effector of a 6'DOF robot arm to construct a redundant macro-micro robot system that is able to emulate the finger-arm system of a human being. However, determining joint angles and velocities of a redundant robot system in a natural way remains a difficult issue. This paper describes a method to control the system so as to generate common motions emulating the hand-arm movement of a human. To achieve this purpose, the finger is primarily supposed to complete delicate local motions while the arm moves to assist the finger when the manipulability of the finger is too low and the system is about to miss the desired target. The effectiveness on motion generation and the relation between kinetic energy and manipulability by using the proposed method has been experimentally demonstrated and discussed.