Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2009
This paper presents a method to obtain near minimum-time trajectories for two coordinated manipulators handling a rigid object. A piece-wise constant function is used to approximate the second derivatives of the generalised coordinates of the manipulators of the system. This transforms the time optimal control problem into a non-linearly constrained optimisation problem. The transformed problem is then solved by the sequential quadratic programming technique. A numerical example involving two SCARA type manipulators handling a long beam is used to illustrate the proposed scheme.