Trajectory planning for a reconfigurable mobile robot in mobile manipulating mode

The trajectory planning in the case of grasping a space target is researched in this paper for a reconfigurable mobile robot, Joint Locomotion - 2 (JL-2), in the Mobile Manipulating (MM) mode. The trajectory is composed of three segments, including the robot locomotion trajectory in plane generated by a cubic polynomial function, the trajectories of the end-effector adjusting its posture and approaching the target. Moreover, the forward and inverse kinematics of JL-2 with 8 DOFs is established. Based on the inverse kinematics, posture variables of the sampling points on the obtained trajectories are converted to the corresponding joint variables. With the movements of joints, JL-2 may accomplish the grasping task along the desired trajectory. The trajectory planning algorithm and kinematics models are simulated in MATLAB, ADAMS, and the real robot platform, respectively. The validity and rationality of the proposed method are verified.