Modeling,tracking, vibration and balance control of an underactuated mobile manipulator (UMM)

This paper presents an underactuated mobile manipulator (UMM) and focuses on solving modeling, tracking, and vibration- and balance-control problems. Although the study has been directed at warehousing applications, the developed techniques are general and can be applied to other applications. The derivation of equations of motion of the UMM, disturbance analysis, and model validation are investigated to reveal the actual system dynamics. Additionally, a simple but effective strategy is also developed to solve the equilibrium point and balance problem. Based on the dynamic model, two control architectures are proposed: Model Predictive Control (MPC) and MPC+Proportional-Integral (PI) with integral actions, respectively, and they can also be applied to other robotic systems. Compared to other MPC-based control strategies, the proposed controllers require less effort to implement in practice. Finally, simulations, experiments, and robustness verification are conducted and discussed, and the results are satisfactory.