Control of Manipulator/Vehicle System for Man-Robot Cooperation Using Fuzzy Logic

This paper proposed a control algorithm of the "Manipulator/Vehicle System for Man-Robot Cooperation". The manipulator/vehicle system has the redundant degrees of freedom. When the desired motion of the manipulator's end effector in the inertial coordinate system is given, the motion has to be decomposed into the motion of the manipulator and the motion of the vehicle. The motion of the end effector on the ground surface should be realized by the vehicle, if we want to move the system to another place, while the motion of the end effector should be realized by the motion of the manipulator, if we want to manipulate an object. The decomposition of the motion of the end effector should be done based on the operator's intention. How to decompose the motion of the end effector is one of the key issues of the manipulator/vehicle system for man-robot cooperation. The control algorithm, which we propose in this paper, controls the motion of the manipulator and vehicle based on the operator's intention modelled by fuzzy rules. The experimental results illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm for manipulator/vehicle system for man-robot cooperation.