A global approach for motion generation of non-holonomic mobile manipulators

A mobile robotic manipulator, i.e. a manipulator mounted on a vehicle, is a very useful system for tasks in dangerous environments. Unfortunately the use of a wheeled vehicle introduces non-holonomic constraints, and the combination of a vehicle and a manipulator generally introduces kinematic redundancy. The goal of this paper is to propose a method to determine a feasible path between two fixed configurations for a mobile manipulator whose vehicle is non-holonomic. For this purpose, we write the global displacement of the system in a symbolic way, using two representation tools: homogeneous matrices and dual quaternions. Then, we compute the corresponding joint parameters to make the desired displacement coincide with the computed symbolic displacement. The method is described and some simulation results are presented.