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,
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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.