A weighted damping coefficient based manipulability maximizing scheme for coordinated motion planning of wheeled mobile manipulators

A novel weighted damping coefficient based manipulability maximizing (WDCMM) scheme is proposed and investigated in this paper for the motion planning of wheeled mobile redundant manipulators. Such a scheme treats the mobile platform and the redundant manipulator as a whole system, and is thus called a coordinated control scheme. In order to improve the manipulability during the end-effector task execution, a manipulability maximizing index is firstly incorporated into the scheme formulation. To remedy the manipulator´s manipulability decreasing and/or the joint variables´ abrupt change (MDJVAC) problem, a weighted damping coefficient matrix is further introduced and considered in such a scheme. For verifying the performance of the proposed WDCMM scheme, we analyze a mobile manipulator model composed of a wheeled mobile platform and a six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) manipulator. Simulations performed on the wheeled mobile manipulator model substantiate well the effectiveness, accuracy and superiority of the proposed WDCMM scheme.