Optimal configuration control for a mobile manipulator

A mobile manipulator-a serial connection of a mobile platform and a task robot-is redundant by itself. Using its redundant freedom, a mobile manipulator can move in various modes,i. e., can perform dexterous tasks. In this paper, to improve task execution efficiency utilizing redundancy, optimal configurations of the mobile manipulator are maintained while it is moving to a new task point. Assuming that a task robot can perform the new task by itself, a desired configuration for the task robot can be pre-determined. Therefore, a cost function for optimality can be defined as a combination of the square errors of the desired and actual configurations of the mobile platform and of the task robot. In the combination of the two square errors, a newly defined mobility of a mobile platform is utilized as a weighting index. With the aid of the gradient method, the cost function is minimized, so the tasle that the mobile manipulator performs is optimized. The proposed algorithm is experimentally verified and discussed with a mobile manipulator, PURL-II.