Copyright © 2012 Yongxin Zhu and Liping Fan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Robust force/motion control strategies are presented for mobile manipulators under both holonomic and nonholonomic constraints in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances. The controls are based on structural knowledge of the dynamics of the robot, and the actuator dynamics is also taken into account. The proposed control is robust not only to structured uncertainty such as mass variation but also to unstructured one such as disturbances. The system stability and the boundness of tracking errors are proved using Lyapunov stability theory. The proposed control strategies guarantee that the system motion converges to the desired manifold with prescribed performance. Simulation results validate that not only the states of the system asymptotically converge to the desired trajectory, but also the constraint force asymptotically converges to the desired force.