Tracking trajectory for nonholonomic mobile manipulator using distributed control strategy

This paper presents a tracking trajectory for nonholonomic mobile manipulator using distributed control strategy. First, the dynamical model of the mobile manipulator is viewed as an interconnection of two subsystems: the mobile platform subsystem and the manipulator subsystem. For the mobile platform subsystem, a novel kinematic controller is developed to obtain a desired velocity. For the manipulator subsystem, the distributed control strategy is used to track a desired trajectory in the joint space and workspace. The inverse kinematics is used to obtain the desired trajectory from the workspace. The distributed control strategy consists of controlling the manipulator starting from the last joint and going backward until the first joint. Lyapunov´s approach is used to prove the stability of the system. A three degrees of freedom mobile manipulator is used for the validation of this control strategy. The experimental results show improved tracking which demonstrates the effectiveness of this control strategy.