Cooperative control of multiple arms mounted on a mobile platform

This paper deals with the control and cooperation of multiple arms mounted on a mobile platform. This represents a highly coupled and redundant system in which the motion of the arms affects the platform motion, and vice versa. The objective is to develop control techniques to accurately track the motion of an object held jointly by a number of arms, while moving the platform along its desired trajectories as closely as possible. Moreover, the internal forces on the object are controlled to avoid damaging the object during manipulation. New dynamic and kinematic hybrid controllers are developed for the system. The dynamic controller is based on full model linearization while the kinematic controller utilises the concept of augmented Jacobian. The performance of the controllers is tested on a full scale simulator of two six-degrees-of-freedom PUMA arms mounted on a three-degrees-of-freedom platform.