A unified framework for reactive control of wheeled mobile manipulators

In this paper, we give an overview of the work we have conducted toward a unified modeling framework for wheeled mobile manipulators (WMM).Where most work in the literature often provide models, sometimes simplified, of a given type of WMM, we give an extensive description of the obtention of explicit kinematic and dynamic models of those systems. This modeling framework is particularly well suited for reactive control approaches which, in the case of mobile manipulation missions, are necessary to handle the complexity of the tasks to be fulfilled, the dynamic aspect of the extended workspace and the uncertainties on the knowledge of the environment. We thus also provide a flexible reactive framework allowing the sequencing of operational tasks whose natures are different but also an on-line switching mechanism between constraints that are to be satisfied using the system redundancy.