A Purely-Reactive Manipulability-Maximising Motion Controller

Abstract: We present a novel approach to controlling the instantaneous velocity of a robot end-effector that is able to simultaneously maximise manipulability and avoid joint limits. It operates on non-redundant and redundant robots, which is achieved by adding artificial redundancy in the form of controlled path deviation. We formulate the problem as a quadratic programme and provide an open-source Python implementation that provides solutions in just a few milliseconds. It accepts a robot model expressed using URDF or Denavit-Hartenberg parameterisation. We compare our method to previous work in simulation and on a physical robot.