A Study on a Mobile Platform-Manipulator

This paper discusses about the decentralized control method for a mobile manipulator, which uses for welding process in many industrial fields. In this paper, the mobile manipulator is divided into two subsystems that are the manipulator and the mobile platform. For this reason, a simple decentralized control method for two subsystems is proposed. The task of the mobile manipulator is the end-effector of the manipulator tracks along a seam and the mobile platform moves to maintain the initial configuration of the manipulator in order to avoiding the singularity of the manipulator in the welding process. Two controllers for the mobile-platform and the manipulator are designed, respectively and they are obtained from the Lyapunov function to ensure the asymptotical stability of the system. The simulation and experimental results have proved the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.