Parsimonious Kinematic Control of Highly Redundant Robots

When a robot is highly redundant in comparison to the task to be executed, current control techniques are not "economic" in the sense that they demand, most of the time unnecessarily, all the joints to move. Such behavior can be undesirable for some applications. In this direction, this work proposes a new control paradigm based on linear programming that intrinsically provides a parsimonious control strategy, i.e, one in which few joints move. In addition to a formal stability proof, this letter presents simulation and experimental results on the HOAP-3 humanoid robot. Finally, a comparison is made with a least-square method based on the pseudoinverse of the task Jacobian, showing that the proposed method indeed uses fewer joints than the classic one.