2023/12/18 by Jonas Wittmann, Wittmann, Jonas, Daniel Hornung +5
Engineering · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Prosthetics and Rehabilitation Robotics #Robot Manipulation and Learning #Robotics (cs.RO) #Teleoperation and Haptic Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.11163
openalex publication_date 2023/12/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Nowadays, robots are applied in dynamic environments. For a robust operation, the motion planning module must consider other tasks besides reaching a specified pose: (self) collision avoidance, joint limit avoidance, keeping an advantageous configuration, etc. Each task demands different joint control commands, which may counteract each other. We present a hierarchical control that, depending on the robot and environment state, determines online a suitable priority among those tasks. Thereby, the control command of a lower-prioritized task never hinders the control command of a higher-prioritized task. We ensure smooth control signals also during priority rearrangement. Our hierarchical control computes reference joint velocities. However, the underlying concepts of hierarchical control differ when using joint accelerations or joint torques as control signals instead. So, as a further contribution, we provide a comprehensive discussion on how joint velocity control, joint acceleration control, and joint torque control differ in hierarchical task control. We validate our formulation in an experiment on hardware.