Distributed formation control of end-effector of mixed planar fully- and under-actuated manipulators

This paper 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 paper 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.