Nonholonomic navigation and control of cooperating mobile manipulators

This paper presents the first motion planning methodology applicable to articulated, non-point nonholonomic robots with guaranteed collision avoidance and convergence properties. It is based on a new class of nonsmooth Lyapunov functions (DILFs) and a novel extension of the navigation function method to account for non-point articulated robots. The Dipolar Inverse Lyapunov Functions introduced are appropriate for nonholonomic control and offer superior performance characteristics compared to existing tools. The new potential field technique uses diffeomorphic transformations and exploits the resulting pointworld topology. The combined approach is applied to the problem of handling deformable material by multiple nonholonomic mobile manipulators in obstacle environment to yield a centralized coordinating control law. Simulation results verify asymptotic convergence of the robots, obstacle avoidance, boundedness of object deformations and singularity avoidance for the manipulators.