COORDINATING THE MOTION OF A MANIPULATOR AND A MOBILE BASE IN TREE ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

The paper presents a nonholonomic motion planner for mobile manipulators moving in outdoor environment amongst trees. The robot is supposed to move autonomously on flat ground, navigate among the trees and reach a specified target point on the three dimensional space, starting from an arbitrary initial position. The approach is based on a discontinuous feedback law under the infuence of a specially designed potential field. The potential field function coordinates the motion of the mobile base and the onboard manipulator. Convergence is shown via Lyapuriov's direct method and validity of the approach is verified through simulation examples.