Kinematic-Model-Free Orientation Control for Robot Manipulation Using Locally Weighted Dual Quaternions

Conventional control of robotic manipulators requires prior knowledge of their kinematic structure. Model-learning controllers have the advantage of being able to control robots without requiring a complete kinematic model and work well in less structured environments. Our recently proposed Encoderless controller has shown promising ability to control a manipulator without requiring any prior kinematic model whatsoever. However, this controller is only limited to position control, leaving orientation control unsolved. The research presented in this paper extends the state-of-the-art kinematic-model-free controller to handle orientation control to manipulate a robotic arm without requiring any prior model of the robot or any joint angle information during control. This paper presents a novel method to simultaneously control the position and orientation of a robot’s end effector using locally weighted dual quaternions. The proposed novel controller is also scaled up to control three-degrees-of-freedom robots.