Abstract
The present paper is a survey and research paper on the treatment of optimal control problems of rigid‐link manipulators by indirect methods. Maximum Principle based approaches provide an excellent tool to calculate optimal reference trajectories for multi‐link manipulators with high accuracy. Their major drawback was the need to explicitly formulate the complicated system of adjoint differential equations and to apply the full apparatus of optimal control theory. This is necessary in order to convert the optimal control problem into a piecewise defined, nonlinear multi‐point boundary value problem. An accurate and efficient access to first‐ and higher‐order derivatives is crucial. The approach described in this paper allows it to generate all the derivative information recursively and simultaneously with the recursive formulation of the equations of motion. Nonlinear state and control constraints are treated without any simplifications by transforming them into sequences of systems of linear equations. By these means, the modeling of the complete optimal control problem and the accompanying boundary value problem is automated to a great extent. The fast numerical solution is by the advanced multiple shooting method JANUS. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)