Abstract
This thesis is devoted to the study of robotic two-arm coordination/manipulation from a unified per- spective, and conceptually different bimanual tasks are thus described within the same formalism. In order to provide a consistent and compact theory, the techniques presented herein use dual quaternions to rep- resent every single aspect of robot kinematic modeling and control. A novel representation for two-arm manipulation is proposed--the cooperative dual task-space--which exploits the dual quaternion algebra to unify the various approaches found in the literature. The method is further extended to take into account any serially coupled kinematic chain, and a case study is performed using a simulated mobile manipulator. An original application of the cooperative dual task-space is pro- posed to intuitively represent general human-robot collaboration (HRC) tasks, and several experimentswere performed to validate the proposed techniques. Furthermore, the thesis proposes a novel class of HRC tasks wherein the robot controls all the coordination aspects; that is, in addition to controlling its own arm, the robot controls the human arm by means of functional electrical stimulation (FES). Thanks to the holistic approach developed throughout the thesis, the resultant theory is compact, uses a small set of mathematical tools, and is capable of describing and controlling a broad range of robot ma- nipulation tasks.