Paper:
Control Strategy for Mobile Manipulators
Hisashi Osumi and Eisuke Konishi
Faculty of Science and Engineering, Chuo University, Kasuga Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 112, Japan
Control strategies for mobile manipulators consisting of a serial link manipulator and a 2DW type platform are reviewed. Since a mobile manipulator has kinematic redundancy and non-holonomic constraints, these two characteristics must be considered in designing controllers. First, the relationship between a target trajectory and a motion command for the mobile manipulator is formulated. Based on the formulation, the characteristics of the least square norm solution for moving a mobile manipulator along a target trajectory is analyzed by a simple simulation. Second, some performance indices for exploiting kinematic redundancy to improve mobility or manipulability of the mobile manipulator are introduced.