Coordinated mobile manipulator point-stabilization using visual-servoing techniques

In this paper we consider the problem of stabilizing in a desired configuration a mobile manipulator; only the arm's joint displacement information and the measures provided by the camera mounted on the end-effector are used to stabilize the system. In particular, no knowledge about the position and orientation of the mobile base is supposed to be available. An hybrid control algorithm, based on the concatenation of a sensor-based feedback control and an open-loop strategy, is proposed. A 3-DOF planar manipulator mounted on a mobile base, modelled as an unicycle, is considered as a case study, and simulation results are reported in order to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed control algorithm.