ABSTRACT
Coordinated controls of multiple mobile manipulators have attracted the at-
tention of many researchers [172], [174], [169]. Interest in multiple mobile
manipulators stems from the better capability of the mobile manipulators in
carrying out more complicated and dextrous tasks which may not be accom-
plished by a single mobile manipulator. It is an important technology for ap-
plying cooperative mobile manipulators to modern factories for transporting
materials, and dangerous fields for dismantling bombs or moving nuclear-
contaminated objects. Controls of multiple mobile manipulators present a
significant increase in complexity over the single mobile manipulator case;
moreover, they are much more difficult and challenging than the controls of
multiple robotic manipulators [170, 171]. The difficulties of the control de-
sign lie in the fact that when multiple mobile manipulators coordinate each
other and they are subject to kinematic constraints, they will form a closed
kinematic chain mechanism that imposes a set of kinematic constraints on
the position and velocity of coordinated mobile manipulators. As a result,
of Mobile
the degrees of freedom of the whole system decrease, and internal forces are
generated which need to be controlled. Therefore, for the above problems, we
propose two coordination control approaches: centralized control and decen-
tralized control in this chapter.
