Modeling and Simulation of Wheeled Mobile Manipulators

A mobile manipulator system typically consists of a mobile base and some manipulators mounted on the mobile base. The typical characteristic of mobile manipulator system is the mobility of mobile base plus the flexibility of manipulators, and this enlarges its applications. In this article, modeling and tracking control is investigated for a wheeled mobile manipulator system composed of a nonholonomic mobile platform and manipulators mounted on the mobile platform. First, kinematics and dynamics of wheeled mobile manipulators are proposed by using Lagrange dynamics equation and nonholonomic dynamics Routh equation. Then, a like- PD controller is presented in which nonlinear feedback is used to decouple the system. The control algorithm guarantees system to track simultaneously the desired end - effector and platform trajectories without violating the nonholonomic constraints and the interaction between the mobile platform and the manipulators. Simulation of a wheeled mobile manipulator system is used to show the validity of modeling and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.