Minimum movement scheme with wheels and joints coordinated simultaneously for mobile redundant manipulator

For returning to a near initial location for a mobile redundant manipulator after a task execution, a wheel-joint coordinated minimum movement (WJCMM) scheme is proposed to minimize the movement/displacement between the final state and the initial state of the mobile robot when the end-effector fulfills a given task. Such a scheme can both coordinate simultaneously the wheels of the mobile platform and the joints of the manipulator to complete the end-effector task, and achieve the movement minimization. Besides, the physical limits of the mobile robot can be incorporated into the proposed WJCMM scheme. Then, the scheme is reformulated as a quadratic program (QP) subject to equality and bound constraints, which is solved by a numerical method based on a piecewise-linear equation (PLE). Simulation results substantiate the efficacy and accuracy of such a WJCMM scheme and the corresponding discrete-time PLE-based numerical QP solver for redundancy resolution.