Design of a Variable Structure Controller for Mobile Manipulators

In this paper, a variable structure control system is proposed for the output tracking control problem of the general mobile manipulators including motor dynamics in the generalized coordinate space. The reduced dynamic model including motor dynamics is developed for mobile manipulators. The system is then decomposed into four lower-dimensional subsystems. There are three procedures in this paper: the design, the simulation, and the experiment. Firstly, we construct the mechanism of the novel mobile manipulator by the fabrication of the manipulator parts and modify the mathematical equation. Secondly, we apply sliding mode control law in the mobile manipulator. Simulation results reveal that this control scheme is promising for controlling the proposed system and reduces chattering greatly. In experimental part, we also successfully use the complex programmable logic device (CPLD) to realize the sliding model controller.