Whole-body impedance control of wheeled mobile manipulators

Humanoid service robots in domestic environments have to interact with humans and their surroundings in a safe and reliable way. One way to manage that is to equip the robotic systems with force-torque sensors to realize a physically compliant whole-body behavior via impedance control. To provide mobility, such robots often have wheeled platforms. The main advantage is that no balancing effort has to be made compared to legged humanoids. However, the nonholonomy of most wheeled systems prohibits the direct implementation of impedance control due to kinematic rolling constraints that must be taken into account in modeling and control. In this paper we design a whole-body impedance controller for such a robot, which employs an admittance interface to the kinematically controlled mobile platform. The upper body impedance control law, the platform admittance interface, and the compensation of dynamic couplings between both subsystems yield a passive closed loop. The convergence of the state to an invariant set is shown. To prove asymptotic stability in the case of redundancy, priority-based approaches can be employed. In principle, the presented approach is the extension of the well-known and established impedance controller to mobile robots. Experimental validations are performed on the humanoid robot Rollin’ Justin. The method is suitable for compliant manipulation tasks with low-dimensional planning in the task space.