Development and Control of Mobile Manipulator - Four-Wheeled Drive Mobile Robot with a 3-DoF Manipulator

In this piece of work we present the development and control of a mobile manipulator - fourwheel drive mobile robot with a three degrees-of-freedom (DoF) manipulator. The parameter of the wheel actuator system are experimentally identified and the gains of PI controller are tuned in offline with the identified model. The velocity kinematics of the four-wheel drive mobile robot is developed. A path-tracking control system is designed using the developed kinematics model of the mobile robot. The path-tracking control system uses the wheel unit encoders in the feedback to estimate the motion of the mobile robot. A position kinematics of three DoF manipulator with a shoulder offset is derived using geometric approach. The trajectory of manipulator's end-effector is controlled using inverse position kinematics. The developed control system is experimentally evaluated with possible maneuverability. From the result it can be inferred that path tracking of the mobile platform was successfully implemented with a maximum error of 1.41%.