Robotic Assembly Using a Singularity-Free Orientation Representation Based on Quaternions

In English New robotic applications often require physical interaction between the robot and its environment. To this purpose, external sensors might be needed, as well as a suitable way to specify the tasks. One complication that might cause problems in the task execution is orientation representation singularities. In this paper quaternions are used as a singularity-free orientation representation within the constraint-based task specification framework. The approach is experimentally verified in a force controlled assembly task. The task chosen contains a redundant degree of freedom that is exploited using the constraint-based task specification framework.