Chaotic zero dynamics in kinematically redundant robots

The authors attempt to integrate two areas in robotics that are maturing rapidly: the control of kinematically redundant rigid robots and feedback linearization. Kinematically redundant robots have several advantages over nonredundant robot arms. The extra degrees of freedom are used to reach around or between obstacles. Unlike nonredundant rigid link robots that do not exhibit zero dynamics, the self motions of kinematically redundant robots can be used for torque optimization or avoiding obstacles. It is shown that induced self motions can be chaotic. The main contribution is to demonstrate chaos in cases of feedback linearization when the decoupling matrix is nonsquare and there are less outputs than inputs