Hybrid position/force control of a mobile manipulator based on cooperative task sharing

This paper proposes a hybrid position/force control of a mobile manipulator to cooperate with its subsystems that consist of a wheeled mobile robot and a manipulator arm. These subsystems have different dynamic characteristics. Moreover, a wheeled mobile robot is subject to nonholonomic constraints. In general, these issues are taken into consideration in developing a planning and control algorithm. This paper describes a unified approach to control a mobile manipulator which can be regarded as a redundant manipulator. In the proposed approach, realizing an optimal configuration control according to the motion of the end-effector, the redundancy of the proposed system is utilized under consideration of the dynamical behavior of the mobile manipulator. Several experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.