Modular composition and self-coordination technique for mobile manipulators

The paper deals with the problem of suitably coordinating the manoeuvring of a non-holonomic vehicle and the motion of a supported manipulator when the overall system is commanded to execute a given grasping or manipulation task. The objective being clearly that of exploiting the extra dof´s offered by the vehicle for cooperatively accomplishing to tasks that otherwise could not be executed by the arm only. Results are obtained by devising an effective technique that, while preserving system modularity, also allows system self-coordination, without explicitly keeping into account the kinematic structure of the underlying subsystems.