Parallel Position and Orientation Control for a Redundant Manipulator Performing the Path Following Task

A path is a time-independent geometric description of a robot motion. It does not impose any time regimes on the controlled robot and is a natural task definition for many industrial and autonomous operations. Therefore, path following algorithms are eagerly developed. However, a lot of them focus only on the position control or planar cases. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed to control simultaneously manipulator position and orientation with respect to the desired path in the 3D space. The motion of the end-effector along the path is described with the non-orthogonal Serret-Frenet parametrization. The standard approach has been extended with the definition of the relative orientation using the minimal representation of Euler angles. The algorithm is validated with a simulation analysis and an experimental study on the laboratory test-bed equipped with the redundant manipulator of 7 degrees of freedom, Kinova® Gen3 Ultra lightweight robot. The comparison of the achieved results proves the theoretical properties and practical suitability of the designed control law.