Redundant robots offer the possibility of improv- ing agility, compared to their non-redundant counterparts, by exploiting the additional kinematic DOFs to increase a measure called manipulability. While it is common to maximize the manipulability measure during redundancy resolution locally, global optimization of a full trajectory is usually computa- tionally too expensive and thus only considered for offline procedures in current literature. However, local maximization is prone to be sub-optimal and at times even fails at preserving agility of a robot that ought to be reactive. In this work we build upon our previous contributions on online trajectory generation on SE(3) and closed-form task space manipulability of a 7-DOF serial robot, and combine it with graph search techniques for global optimization. This enables, for the first time, online tra- jectory generation with globally optimal redundancy resolution regarding manipulability, to maintain agility in reactive robot behavior.     «

Redundant robots offer the possibility of improv- ing agility, compared to their non-redundant counterparts, by exploiting the additional kinematic DOFs to increase a measure called manipulability. While it is common to maximize the manipulability measure during redundancy resolution locally, global optimization of a full trajectory is usually computa- tionally too expensive and thus only considered for offline procedures in current literature. However, local maximization is prone to be...     »