Cooperative assembling using multiple robotic manipulators

The scenario of cooperative assembling of multiple components in different locations is taken into consideration in this paper. It consists of two phases, including cooperative grasping and transporting respectively. Towards this end, a general nonlinear 3-DOF (degree of freedom) Euler-Lagrange model of the robotic manipulator is firstly established. A nonlinear distributed control law using a two-way-ring network topology is then proposed for each manipulator to cooperatively move from initial location to the desired location. Notably, we simply omit the control of end-effector of each manipulator and only focus on the cooperative control of multiple manipulators' trajectories. In the end, an assembling example of three components by three robotic manipulators is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.