A synchronization approach to the mutual error control of a mobile manipulator

Precise tracking control of a mobile manipulator is a challenging problem in which tracking errors of the vehicle and the manipulator merge and jointly affect the endpoint trajectory performance. A synchronization approach to minimize the mutual errors between the vehicle and the manipulator is reported in this paper. The basic idea is to utilize the cross-coupling concept to cooperate motions of the vehicle and the manipulator so that the both tracking errors are compensated each other. An adaptive synchronized controller is proposed to guarantee asymptotic convergence to zero of the position tracking error and the synchronization error of the mobile manipulator. The controller is in a decentralized architecture for easy implementation, and is able to address model uncertainty problem. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.