On the stability of the constrained robotic maneuvers.

The stability of the environment and a manipulator taken as a whole has been investigated, and a bound for stable manipulation has been derived using unstructured models for the dynamic behavior of the robot manipulator and the environment. This unified approach of modeling robot dynamics is expressed in terms of sensitivity functions, as opposed to the Lagrangian approach. In this way, the authors incorporate the dynamic behavior of all the elements of a robot manipulator (i.e. actuators, sensors and the structural compliance of the links) in addition to the rigid-body dynamics. It is shown that for stability of the robot, there must be some initial compliancy either in the robot or in the environment. The general stability condition has been extended to the particular case where the environment is very rigid in comparison with the robot stiffness.