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Design and analysis of a whole-body controller for a velocity controlled robot mobile manipulator

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Abstract

Mobile manipulators, which are intrinsically redundant when the manipulator and mobile base are moving together, are known for their capabilities to carry out multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a whole-body control framework, inspired by legged bio-robots, for a velocity controlled non-holonomic mobile manipulator based on task priority. Control primitives, such as manipulability optimization, trajectory tracking of the end-effector and mobile base, and collision avoidance, are considered in the framework and arranged at different priorities. Lower priority tasks are projected into the null space of control tasks with higher priorities. As a result, lower level tasks are completed without affecting the performance of higher priority tasks. Several experiments are implemented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller. The proposed method is proved to be an effective way to solve the whole-body control problem of velocity controlled mobile manipulators.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61773139), Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (Grant No. KQTD2016112515134654), Shenzhen Special Fund for Future Industrial Development (Grant No. JCYJ20160425150757025), and Open Research Project of the State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, China (Grant No. ICT1900357).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    Mantian Li, Zeguo Yang, Fusheng Zha & Pengfei Wang

  2. Shenzhen Academy of Aerospace Technology, Shenzhen, 518057, China

    Fusheng Zha & Xin Wang

  3. Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Ping Li & Qinyuan Ren

  4. Active Perception and Robot Interactive Learning Laboratory, Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova 30, 16160, Italy

    Fei Chen

Authors
  1. Mantian Li
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  2. Zeguo Yang
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  3. Fusheng Zha
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  4. Xin Wang
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  5. Pengfei Wang
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  6. Ping Li
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  7. Qinyuan Ren
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  8. Fei Chen
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Correspondence to Fusheng Zha or Fei Chen.

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Li, M., Yang, Z., Zha, F. et al. Design and analysis of a whole-body controller for a velocity controlled robot mobile manipulator. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 63, 170204 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-2741-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-2741-6

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