Modeling and motion planning for mechanisms on a non-inertial base

Robotic manipulators on ships and platforms suffer from large inertial forces due to the non-inertial motion of the ship or platform. When operating in high sea state, operation of such manipulators can be made more efficient and robust if these non-inertial effects are taken into account in the motion planning and control systems. Motivated by this application, we present a rigorous and singularity-free formulation of the dynamics of a robotic manipulator mounted on a non-inertial base. We extend the classical dynamics equations for a serial manipulator to include the 6-DoF motion of the non-inertial base. Then, we show two examples of a 1-DoF and a 4-DoF manipulator to illustrate how these non-inertial effects can be taken into account in the motion planning.