Region-Reaching Control of Robots

In conventional setpoint control problem of robots, the desired position is specified as a point. However, it is interesting to observe from most human reaching movements that the desired targets are regions rather than points. In fact, when the desired region is specified arbitrarily small, it reduces to a point. In this paper, we propose a new control concept called region reaching control for robots. In this new control concept, the desired objective can be specified as a region instead of a point. Since the desired region can be specified arbitrarily small, the region control concept is also a generalization of setpoint control problem. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed controllers.