On Predictive Approach to Inverse Kinematics of Mobile Manipulators

In this paper we study the inverse kinematic problem for mobile manipulators, consisting of a nonholonomic mobile platform with a manipulator mounted atop of it. Inverse kinematics is defined in terms of the endogenous configuration framework. We propose a general algorithm of finding inverse kinematics based on the model predictive control approach. As an exemplification of this algorithm we present a generalization of one of the Jacobian inverse kinematic algorithms. The method properties are analyzed in simulations.