Cartesian-space time delay compensation in leader-follower coordination of two manipulators using exponential time functions

Coordinated control of two manipulators carrying a common object using discrete position feedback is developed and tested using a multiprocessor architecture and two PUMA robot arms. Leader-follower coordination is used because of its computational efficiency. Computation and other timing delays incur the loss of two sampling intervals. A class of predictive filters is designed to compensate for these delays. These filters are developed using the desired positions of the delayed follower arm to estimate a model of its desired trajectory using exponential time functions. Both exact and least square spline fitting are carried out and the performances of the resulting estimators are compared.<>