Adaptive Control of Mobile Manipulator Robot based on Virtual
Decomposition Approach
Abdelkrim Brahmi
1
, Maarouf Saad
1
, Guy Gauthier
1
, Wen-Hong Zhu
2
and Jawhar Ghommam
3
1
Electrical Engineering Department, École de Technologie Supérieure, Montréal, QC, Canada
2
Space Exploration Canadian Space Agency,
Montréal, QC, Canada
3
Ecole National d’Ingenieurs, Research Unit on Mechatronics and Automation Systems, Sfax, Tunisia
Keywords: Virtual Decomposition Control, Adaptive Control, Centralized/Decentralized Control, Mobile Manipulator
Robot.
Abstract: This paper presents an adaptive control scheme for a mobile manipulator robot based on the virtual
decomposition control (VDC). The control strategy was tested on three degrees of freedom manipulator arm
mounted on two degrees of freedom mobile platform to track a desired trajectory. The desired trajectory
is obtained from the workspace trajectory using the inverse kinematics. Differently to the known
decentralized control that divides the mobile manipulator into two subsystems, in this paper, the mobile
manipulator has N degrees of freedom, divided virtually into N subsystems. The applicability of the
proposed scheme is demonstrated in real time validation. The experimental results show the effectiveness of
the VDC approach.
1 INTRODUCTION
The need for robots capable of locomotion and
manipulation has led to the design of mobile
manipulator robot (MMR) platforms. A mobile
manipulator is a robotic manipulator arm mounted
on a mobile platform. Typical examples of MMR
include satellite arms, underwater robots in seabed
exploration and vehicles used in extra-planetary
exploration. The mobile manipulator comprises two
subsystems, that is, the mobile platform and the
manipulator arm subsystem.
However, this
significantly complicates the robotic system as its
control design complexity increases greatly. The
problem of controlling the mechanical system lies in
the fact that it imposes a set of kinematic constraints
on the coordination of the position and velocity of
the mobile manipulator. Few works have been
proposed to solve the control problem of these
robotic systems, which have high degrees of
freedom and are tightly interconnected.
In the recent years, the research in the design,
control, stability, and path tracking of mobile
manipulators have significantly increased. Most of
these studies have thus far focused on the tracking
control of mobile manipulators. Two main schemes
of control are developed in the literature: The first
one is centralized control, in which the mobile
manipulator is regarded as one system and the
controller is designed for the full system. The second
one is the decentralized control, in which controllers
for two subsystems are designed separately and no
coupling is considered. In the first approach, where
the mobile platform and the manipulator arm are
regarded as a complete system, many control
approaches were developed and implemented. In
(Yamamoto and Yun 1994), the authors focused on
the interaction between the manipulator arm and the
mobile platform. A nonlinear feedback control was
developed to compensate the dynamic interaction.
Studies discussing the problem of modeling and
control of mobile manipulator were given in (Chung
and Velinsky 1998, Seraji 1998, Song et al. 2005,
Aviles et al. 2012, Galicki 2012), where the robotics
system is considered as a complete system. Many
other works have used decentralized control for this
type of robotic systems as in (Tan and Xi 2001, Ngo
et al. 2007, Ge et al. 2008, Chen et al. 2015) where
the manipulator arm and the mobile platform are
viewed as two separated subsystems. LQR controller
for mobile manipulator was proposed (Chen et al.
2015), where the manipulator arm and the mobile