An on-line approach to coordinated mobility and manipulation

The author presents simple and computationally efficient approach for online coordinated control of mobile robots consisting of a manipulator arm mounted on a mobile base. The effect of base mobility on the end-effector manipulability index is discussed. The base mobility and arm manipulation degrees of freedom are treated equally as the joints of a kinematically redundant composite robot. The redundancy introduced by the mobile base is exploited to satisfy a set of user-defined additional tasks during the end-effector motion. A simple online control scheme that allows the user to assign weighting factors to individual degrees-of-mobility and degrees-of-manipulation, as well as to each task specification, is proposed. The computational efficiency of the control algorithm makes it particularly suitable for real-time implementations. A computer simulation study for a spatial three-jointed manipulator mounted on a one degree-of-freedom mobile platform, which demonstrates the online coordination of mobility and manipulation, is presented