Multiple manipulator control from a human motor-control perspective

The human motor-control system has a hierarchical and decentralized structure, and building such a control system for a multiple robot system would require a decomposed model. The difficulty in decomposing complex robotic systems is due to interactions between robots, and the paper proposes a control architecture that controls the manipulator joints and interactions separately. A decomposable model for an N - n degrees-of-freedom multimanipulator/object system handling an object is derived. This model is then used to design a Lyapunov-based fuzzy logic controller for the system by solving linear matrix equalities. It is shown that this controller is closed-loop stable and a stable suboptimal controller for the system may be designed using bounds.