Cooperative Control of Dual Series Robots

Development in manufacturing, automation, space and underwater exploration
has shown vast number of robots being used where most of the existing robots are of
coordinated control of a single arm only. Increasing demand for robots application,
especially in manufacturing has opened a new challenge; dual arm robot cooperation.
This challenge is to develop robots which can carry out greater task which could either
be heavy in load or complex in working. The main objectives for this project are to
study on the available techniques of cooperative control, to design a program based on
the chosen technique, to integrate the program in the system of two existing robot arms
handling one common load and to ensure precise tracking of a desired formation and
simplicity in its design. The methods being used in this project are performing literature
review, selection of cooperative control technique where three cooperative control
techniques namely Master/Slave control, Centralized and Decentralized control are
compared and implemented to the existing robots, as well as conducting experiment on
the real system. Results from the experiment are analyzed and improvised to prove that
cooperative control technique could be used for this study. Results from this study are
in form of programming of the control system, ladder diagram showing inputs and
outputs of the system utilized and calculation of error of relative coordinate of the two
robots after experiment execution. In conclusion, master/slave technique has been
selected to be most suitable for this study based on its accuracy and simplicity of its
design. The objectives for this project have been achieved where no error above lmm
recorded which indicates accuracy and number of lines of programming are 21 lines for
Master and 16 lines for Slave robot thus, proving its simplicity. However, improvement
on the method used could be further studied to minimize number of lines, using other
method or extension of this project where rotational motion could be studied.