Continuous whole-body motion in robots for humanitarian demining

In the context of control, the motion of the legged robot is very challenging compared with traditional fixed manipulator. Recently, many researches have been conducted to control the motion of legged robot with different techniques. On the other hand, manipulation tasks have been considered in many studies. These studies solve either the mobility or the manipulation problems, but integrating both properties in one system are still not available.

In this thesis, a control algorithm is presented to control both locomotion and manipulation in a six-legged robot. Joint redundancy of the robot will be exploited in order to generate whole body motion behaviour.

In order to qualify the robot to perform more tasks in addition to the walking task, new constraints are implemented. Adding or removing constraints will cause change in the size and structure of motion space. Therefore, a trade-off between the number of the achieved tasks and the constraints must be realised. Furthermore, an appropriate hierarchy should be imposed in order to ensure an accurate decoupling between tasks. Decoupling tasks will enable the interference between tasks and preventing conflicts. Consequently, this allows full exploiting to redundant DoFs and enhancing the robot performance.