This paper presents an integrated task planning and control approach for manipulating a nonholonomic cart by mobile manipulators. The task considered in this study is to manipulate a nonholonomic cart to perform certain tasks such as pushing the cart along a straight line, making a turn at a corner, or tracking a sine wave. The cart manipulation task fully integrates the motion and force planni...

This paper presents a new platform with a team of lab-scale networked mobile robotic manipulators (SumoMote) which merges a mobile manipulator with wireless mobile sensor networks. Many existing platforms built for mobile manipulation are big and expensive. Our SumoMote is built small and inexpensive for applications where quantity is more important than size. The hardware and software of the S...

We consider the task-oriented modeling of the differential kinematics of nonholonomic mobile manipulators (NMMs). A suitable NMM Jacobian is defined that relates the available input commands to the time derivative of the task variables, and can be used to formulate and solve kinematic control problems. When the NMM is redundant with respect to the given task, we provide an extension of two well...

This paper presents an application of a robust adaptive control strategy to HexaSlide type six degrees-of-freedom parallel manipulators . The HexaSlide type parallel manipulators are characterized as an architecture with constant link lengths that are attached to moving sliders on the ground and to a mobile platform. The proposed control law is developed based on a simplified second order syste...

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the effect of small variations (uncertainties) and large variations in design parameters on the size and shape of the workspace of the wire-actuated parallel manipulators. The static force/moment balance equations, taking into account the null space of the Jacobian matrix, are used for the workspace analysis. The parameters examined include: the windin...

We address the motion planning problem for multiple cooperating manipulators on nonholonomic carts. The mobile manipulators possess the ability to manipulate and transport objects while holding them in a stable grasp. We present a general approach that allows the generation of optimal trajectories and actuator inputs for any given maneuver in the presence of obstacles. We assume a meaningful in...

A planning methodology for nonholonomic mobile platforms with manipulators in the presence of obstacles is developed that employs smooth and continuous functions such as polynomials. The method yields admissible input trajectories that drive both the manipulator and the platform to a desired configuration and is based on mapping the nonholonomic constraint to a space where it can be satisfied t...

Wheeled mobile manipulators utilize both the locomotion capabilities of the wheeled platform and manipulation capacity of the arm. While the modelling and control of such systems have previously been studied, most of them have considered robots with rigid suspension and their wheels are subject to pure rolling conditions. To relax the aforementioned limiting assumptions, this research addresses...

We present a modeling framework which combines kinematic and dynamic aspects of a motion planning task. This paper presents the control algorithms for multiple mobile manipulators cooperatively grasping and transporting an object. The planning and control tasks are decentralized, and the framework explicitly incorporates the protocols used to coordinate the robots in the team. The framework is ...

In this paper, we present a method for programming robust, reusable and hardware-abstracted robot skills. The goal of this work is to supply mobile robot manipulators with a library of skills that incorporate both sensing and action, which permit robot novices to easily reprogram the robots to perform new tasks, as well as provide a more clear mapping between human and robot actions. Critical t...