In this paper, the problem of impedance control of dual-arm cooperative manipulators is studied. A general impedance control scheme is adopted, which encompasses a centralized impedance control strategy, aimed at conferring a compliant behavior at the object level, and a decentralized impedance control, enforced at the end-effector level, aimed at avoiding large internal loading of the object. Remarkably, the mechanical impedance behavior is defined in terms of geometrically consistent stiffness. The overall control scheme is based on a twoloop arrangement, where a simple proportional integral derivative inner motion loop is adopted for each manipulator, while an outer loop, using force and moment measurements at the robots wrists, is aimed at imposing the desired impedance behaviors. The developed control scheme is experimentally tested on a dual-arm setup composed of two 6-DOF industrial manipulators carrying a common object. The experimental investigation concerns the four different controller configurations that can be achieved by activating/deactivating the single impedance controllers.

This article presents new closed-loop schemes for solving the inverse kinematics of constrained redundant manipula tors. In order to exploit the space of redundancy, the end- effector task is suitably augmented by adding a constraint task. The success of the technique is guaranteed either by specifying the constraint task ad hoc or by resorting to a task priority strategy. Instead of previous inverse kinemat ics schemes that use the Jacobian pseudoinverse, the schemes in this work are shown to converge using the Jacobian transpose. A number of case studies illustrate different ways of solving redundancy in the context of the proposed schemes.

New definitions of force and velocity manipulability ellipsoids for multiple-arm systems are given in this paper. A suitable kinetostatic formulation for multiple cooperating arms is adopted that allows a global task space description of external and internal forces as well as absolute and relative velocities at the object level. The well-known concept of a force manipulability ellipsoid for a single arm is formally extended to the multiarm case by regarding the whole system as a mechanical transformer from the extended joint space to the global task space. Kinetostatic duality properties are then conveniently exploited to derive velocity manipulability ellipsoids for the multiple-arm system. The proposed method is compared with other approaches via numerical examples.

A novel approach to fault diagnosis of discrete event systems is presented in this paper. The standard approach is based on the offline computation of the set of fault events that may have occurred at each reachable state, providing a fast online diagnosis at a price of excessive memory requirements. A different approach is here adopted, which is based on the online computation of the set of possible fault events required to explain the last observed event. This is efficiently achieved by modelling the plant by Petri nets, since their mathematical representation permits to formulate the fault diagnosis problems in terms of mathematical programming, which is a standard tool. Moreover, the graphical representation of the net allows the diagnoser agent to compute off-line reduced portions of the net in order to improve the efficiency of the online computation, without a big increase in terms of memory requirement

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