Cooperative Grasping Control of Multiple Nonholonomic Mobile Manipulators with Obstacle Avoidance

Abstract

We present a novel cooperative grasping control framework for multiple kine- matic nonholonomic mobile manipulators. Our control framework enables mul- tiple mobile manipulators to drive the grasped object with velocity commands, while rigidly maintaining the grasping shape with no dedicated grasp-enforcing xtures. And also, obstacle avoidance framework either via their whole formation maneuver or internal formation reconguration is proposed. For this, nonholo- nomic passive decomposition [1, 2] is utilized to split the robots' motion into the three aspects (i.e., grasping shape

grasped object maneuver

internal motions) so that we can control these aspects simultaneously and separately. Peculiar dy- namics of the internal motions is exploited to achieve obstacle avoidance via the formation reconguration. Simulations are performed to support the theory.