Control of a mobile manipulator based on equivalent mass matrix

This paper describes a novel method to control a mobile manipulator of which the working direction is restricted along the moving direction. In our method, the equivalent mass matrix (EMM) is applied as an index to determine the robot motion performance. In general, manipulability measure is often used as an index of the high performance motion, because the value of manipulability measure shows the higher manipulation balanced in the whole direction. In the same motion task, however, the robot has the restriction of the working direction and it is required to get higher performance along the target direction. In the proposed method, the application of the EMM realizes higher manipulation along only a specified direction.