Advanced control and application of multiple mobile manipulators

Mobile manipulation is a fast-growing area of robotics research. Unlike those traditional robotics research areas such as perception, motion planning, manipulation, control, cognition, and artificial intelligence, which are focused on a specific task or application, the mobile manipulation seeks to develop integrated robotic systems capable of addressing a wide range of applications in real-world environments. Mobile manipulation aims to integrate the theoretical work and experimental platform to facilitate robotics capabilities in both mobility and manipulation. Thus, they can combine the advantages of mobile platforms and robotic arms and reduce the drawbacks, to be widely applied in different industrial and productive fields, such as health, mining, construction, rescue missions or daily assistance for senior and/or disabled.*The proposed research program will investigate the advanced control of mobile manipulators. The integrated adaptive robust control design of single mobile manipulator will be developed first. The novel path planning and obstacle avoidance method under nonholonomic constraints is considered, and the advanced adaptive robust control for the nonlinear mobile manipulator dynamics with uncertainty is proposed which takes into account all issues of redundancy, nonholonomy, dynamic interaction, dynamic uncertainty, and motion/force control. To achieve good coordinated motion of multiple mobile manipulators, a decentralized cooperative control approach will be developed, which takes care of the system's closed-chain dynamics and internal forces together. For the teleoperation application of mobile manipulators, a novel multiple degree of freedom haptic master structure will be designed to realize the efficient mapping to redundant slave mobile manipulator and the bilateral/multilateral teleoperation control of mobile manipulators will be developed where the time delay and the performance requirements need to be considered together.*