Towards Constraint-based Actuation Allocation for Hyper-redundant Manipulators*

Hyper-redundant robotic manipulators are robots that have many more degrees of freedom than re-quired for a task such as grasping an object in 3D space. The large number of joints, possibly ranging from dozens to thousands, offers both challenges and opportunities for control of such robots. A challenge is to develop algorithms that scale and adapt to different configurations while taking into account a variety of robot constraints. An opportu-nity is to use the extra degrees of freedom to opti-mally control multiple objectives. In this paper, we propose to use a control approach based on con-strained optimization. We present robot and task models and discuss first results. 1