Recurrent neural networks for minimum infinity-norm kinematic control of redundant manipulators

This paper presents two neural network approaches to minimum infinity-norm solution of the velocity inverse kinematics problem for redundant robots. Three recurrent neural networks are applied for determining a joint velocity vector with its maximum absolute value component being minimal among all possible joint velocity vectors corresponding to the desired end-effector velocity. In each proposed neural network approach, two cooperating recurrent neural networks are used. The first approach employs two Tank-Hopfield networks for linear programming. The second approach employs two two-layer recurrent neural networks for quadratic programming and linear programming, respectively. Both the minimal 2-norm and infinity-norm of joint velocity vector can be obtained from the output of the recurrent neural networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approaches are effective with the second approach being better in terms of accuracy and optimality.