Kinematic Modeling and Motion Control of an Omnidirectional Mobile Manipulator Driven by Differential Drive Steering Units

摘要

Manipulators have been used in a large range of applications mainly in the production industry, but their application is limited in scenarios which need a very large working space. Mobile manipulators extend the workspace of manipulators by mounting them on mobile platforms. The paper presents the kinematic modeling and motion control for a special class of mobile manipulators. The mobile manipulator consists of a mobile platform driven by two Differential Drive Steering Units (DDSUs) and a robotic arm with 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF). The mobile platform provides additional 3 DoF in motion. This leads to a total of 9 DoF in the configuration space for the whole mobile manipulator. The paper develops a generic kinematic model of mobile platforms driven by DDSUs that includes the kinematic motion constraints of the system. By allowing the concurrent use of all DoF in the configuration space, this enables large scale continuous manipulation task like performing welding operations exceeding the reach of commonly used manipulators. The developed kinematic model is evaluated by experimental analysis.