In this thesis, design and control issues of a redundant manipulator are handled with special focus on humanoid robot. Unlike the conventional industrial robot, humanoid robots are constructed for utilization in the environment of human daily life such as home, office and other public facilities. And they are usually attached with manipulators to provide various services to human being. Therefore, the manipulators are required to have a human-friendly appearance and to mimic the human motion. A simple solution is the human-like structure which can be represented by a seven degree of freedom (DOF) serial link manipulator with appropriate joint limits and link shapes.
In addition to providing a design guideline considering the dimension, a human-like pose generation method is considered based on Gradient Projection Method(GPM) which resolves redundancy according to a predefined cost function. Therefore, special care has to be taken in selecting an appropriate cost function. Moreover, in order to provide flexibility to generate a human-friendly pose, each joint limit range is divided into main and sub ranges. And sigmoid functions with different parameters are utilized to build up a cost function, where joint limit avoidance is also achieved by the proposed cost function. In order to show the validity of the proposed cost function, some simulations and experiments are conducted, and results are presented comparing with conventional GPM.
