This paper proposes a performance index for the multiple shape object handling of dual arm manipulator to determine whether a robot is good or not. When the dual‐arm manipulator grasps a fixed object and is posed, the dual‐arm manipulator should procure a space to freely control the manipulator. As a performance evaluation parameter, each joint torque from current sensor signal is utilized. From the current information, torque and energy for each joint are estimated. In this paper an performance index for an unstructured object is defined by an energy‐cost function, and stability analysis for each motion is derived by the maximum force to the object. The maximum force to the object is computed by the inertia of object and acceleration information of end‐effector. The acceleration data are derived by the double derivation of each encoder signal. Manipulability measure which implies how efficiently the dual –arm manipulator can move with the grasped object, can be represented by the intersection of the two manipulability ellipsoids for the left and right arms. Effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been verified through the practical simulations and real experiments.

This paper proposes an optimal posture for the task-oriented movement of dual arm manipulator. A stability criterion function which consists of three kinds of feature-representative parameters has been utilized to define the optimal posture. The first parameter is the force which is applied to the object. The torque of each joint and position of arm are attained from the current sensor and encoder, respectively. From these two data, the applied force to an object is estimated using sum of vectors of the joint torques estimated from the measured current. In order to investigate the robustness of each posture, the variation of the end-effector from the encoder information has been utilized as the second parameter. And for the last parameter for the optimality, the total energy consumption has been used. The total consuming energy of each posture can be computed from the current information and the battery voltage. The proposed robot structure consists of a mobile inverted pendulum and dual manipulators. In order to define the optimal posture for the each object, external disturbances are applied to the mobile inverted pendulum robot and the first and second parameters are investigated to find the optimal posture among the pre-selected most representative postures. Finally, the proposed optimal posture has been verified by the proposed stability criterion function which consists of total force to the object, the fluctuation of the end-effector position, and total energy consumption. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms has been verified and demonstrated through the practical simulations and real experiments.