Trajectory control of a 3-link planar manipulator using virtual link based controller

Abstract

A hyper-redundant manipulator has the advantage that it can be used in constraint space; however the control of hyper-redundant manipulator is difficult. This paper presents a concept of virtual link based two degrees of freedom (DOF) controller. With the proposed controller, manipulator of any number of links can be reduced to either a 2-link virtual manipulator or one real and one virtual link manipulator. To illustrate the methodology, a 3-link planar hyper-redundant manipulator has been considered. Simulations have been carried out to validate the efficacy of the controller. The developed control scheme can be used in trajectory control of manipulators used for surgical applications i.e., in-vivo robot.