Space manipulator systems having spacecraft actuators turned off, operate in free-floating mode, and exhibit nonholonomic behaviour due to angular momentum conservation. The system is underactuated and a challenging problem is to control both the location of the end effector and the attitude of the base, using manipulator actuators only. A developed path planning method that perform this task i...

This paper is devoted to planning and control of a pattern formation of mobile robots when moving between goal points in a known and static environment. Path planning is performed for a reference point in the formation using the modified A* search, coupled with a proposed smoothing technique to generate a feasible trajectory with nonholonomic constraints of mobile robots taken into account. Bas...

Coordinated object manipulation is a fundamental problem in the study of multingered robotic hands. The conventional study has been focused on deriving control algorithms for nger joints to implement a speci ed object trajectory and recently more e ort has been put into the study of automatic object trajectory planning. This paper discusses how to plan large-scale object reorientation with nger...

Robust hybrid controller design is presented in this paper for motion/force control of mechanical systems subjected to a set of holonomic or classical nonholonomic constraints and in the presence of uncertainties about plant parameters. A uni ed and systematic procedure is employed to derive the controllers for both holonomic and nonholonomic constrained mechanical systems, respectively. The pr...

Abstract: For logistics centers the disposition and dispatch of goods has reached a high standard of automation. However, the trucks and trailers bringing and taking the goods are driven manually. This can at least be improved for the non-public traffic in the scope of logistics centers by autonomous forward and backward motion control for standard transportation vehicles. By an experimental sy...

A Dubins path is a shortest path with bounded curvature. The seminal result in nonholonomic motion planning is that (in the absence of obstacles) a Dubins path consists either from a circular arc followed by a segment followed by another arc, or from three circular arcs [Dubins, 1957]. Dubins original proof uses advanced calculus; later, Dubins result was reproved using control theory technique...

Underactuated manipulation is the process of controlling several object degrees-of-freedom with fewer robot actuators. Underactuated manipulation allows us to build dexterous robots with only a few actuators. In this paper we explore the possibility of useful dynamic manipulation with only a single actuator. Our case study is a ball rolling in an asymmetrical bowl which can be accelerated along...

Abstract In this paper a dexterity measure is proposed for driftless nonholonomic systems. Admissible motions at a given state of a nonholonomic system are described by the controllability (Lie) algebra of the system. The algebra is completely described by Lie monomials (vector fields) produced by the Lie bracketing of vector fields associated with the system. At a given state, the nonholonomic...

We obtain the equations of motion for a Lagrangian dynamical system under nonholonomic constraints making use of the D’Alembert principle. We show that the Lagrange multipliers can be expressed in terms of the Poisson bracket of the Hamiltonian and the constraint. This appealing result greatly simplifies the derivation of the equations of motion. The existence of at least two conserved quantiti...

In this paper, force/motion tracking control is investigated for nonholonomic mobile manipulators with unknown parameters and disturbances under uncertain holonomic constraints. The nonholonomic mobile manipulator is transformed into a reduced chained form, and then, robust adaptive force/motion control with hybrid variable signals is proposed to compensate for parametric uncertainties and supp...