Control Of Mobile Manipulators Including Vehicle Dynamic Characteristics

Abstract

The dynamic interactions between a mobile manipulator and its vehicle are shown to lead to poor performance when conventional fixed-base controllers, which neglect these interactions, are used. An extended jacobian transpose control algorithm is developed, which accounts for dynamic vehicle motions caused by manipulator motions. It is shown to perform well, even in the presence of modeling errors and using only limited sensory data, such as would be practically available in highly unstructured field environments. I. INTRODUCTION In the future, robotic and telerobotic manipulators mounted on moving vehicles will play important roles in unstructured or hostile environments, performing such tasks as ordnance disposal, toxic waste cleanup, and fire-fighting. A number of prototype systems are being proposed and developed for these applications 1-2 , see Figure 1. However, due to the interactions between the manipulator and its vehicle, these systems present challenging control...