Motion control of mobile manipulators

Presents a simple and computationally efficient approach of online coordinated control of mobile robots consisting of a manipulator arm mounted on a mobile base. The effect of base mobility on the end-effector manipulability index is discussed. The base mobility and arm manipulation degrees of freedom are treated equally as the joints of a kinematically redundant composite robot. The redundancy introduced by the mobile base is exploited to satisfy a set of user-defined additional tasks during the end-effector motion. A simple online control scheme is proposed which allows the user to assign weighting factors to individual degrees-of-mobility and degrees-of-manipulation, as well as to each task specification. The computational efficiency of the control algorithm makes it particularly suitable for real-time implementations. A computer simulation study is presented for a spatial three-jointed manipulator mounted on a one-DOF mobile platform, and demonstrates the online coordination of mobility and manipulation