Adaptive coordinated control of multi-mobile manipulator systems

This paper presents an adaptive coordinated control scheme for multiple mobile manipulator robots (MMR) moving a rigid object in coordination. The dynamic parameters of the object handled and of the mobile manipulators are considered unknown but constant. The control law and the adaptation of uncertain parameters are designed using the virtual decomposition (VDC) approach. This control approach was originally applied to multiple manipulator robot systems. The proposed control design ensures that the position error in the workspace converges to zero, and that the external force error is bounded. The global stability of the system using VDC is proven through the virtual stability of each subsystem. Numerical simulations and an experimental validation are carried out for two mobile manipulators transporting an object, and are compared with the results obtained using the computed torque approach in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.