Coordination of a nonholonomic mobile platform and an on-board manipulator

Abstract

© 2014 IEEE. Mobile manipulators provide more advantages and flexibility in a wide range of applications than standard manipulators by introducing mobility. However, adding mobile platforms to standard manipulators, especially nonholonomic mobile platforms, introduces new challenges to the system modeling and control. Most existing methods for mobile manipulators do not consider the performance difference between the mobile platform and the manipulator and therefore cannot handle the uncertain and unexpected events happened in both the mobile platform and the manipulator. This paper introduces a planning and control method in a perceptive reference frame for a nonholonomic mobile manipulator to efficiently handle uncertain and unexpected events. The experimental results on a nonholonomic mobile manipulator demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the designed method.