Nonlinear disturbance decoupling for a nonholonomic mobile robotic manipulation platform

A mobile manipulator is at the present time a widespread term to refer to robot systems built from a robotic manipulator arm mounted on a mobile platform. A mobile manipulation system offers a dual advantage of mobility offered by a mobile platform and dexterity offered by the manipulator. In this work, the tracking and nonlinear disturbance decoupling problems are studied. We show that this system posses the necessary geometric structure for complete disturbance decoupling between the outputs and disturbances. Simulation results obtained for the mobile manipulator show good performance in the presence of significant disturbances using the designed nonlinear controller.