Distributed Formation Control of End-Effector of Mixed Planar Fully- and Under-Actuated Manipulators

This letter addresses the problem of end-effector formation control for a mixed group of two-link manipulators moving in a horizontal plane that comprises of fully-actuated manipulators and underactuated manipulators with only the second joint being actuated (referred to as the passive-active manipulators or simply PA manipulators). The problem is solved by extending the distributed end-effector formation controller for the fully-actuated manipulator to the PA manipulator moving in a horizontal plane by using its integrability. This letter presents stability analysis of the closed-loop systems under a given necessary condition, and we prove that the networked end-effectors converge to the desired shape. The proposed method is validated by simulations.