Analysis on the interaction between the nonholonomic mobile modular robot and the environment

To execute such robotic tasks as behaving interactions with the environment, it is required to control not only the position of a manipulator but also the force exerted at the contact. The paper first presents the dynamic modeling of the mobile modular robot (MMR) which is composed of the mobile platform and the modular manipulator. The mobile robot, having two degrees of freedom(DOF) because of the non-holonomic constraints, is combined with the atop manipulator as a whole body. The controller is proposed with both the redundancy resolution and optimization of null space motion. A 5-DOF modular manipulator mounted on the mobile platform is built up to verify the proposed control law via simulations and real experiments and their results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.