Teleoperation of mobile manipulators with non-holonomic restrictions

This paper presents a novel adaptive controller for the bilateral teleoperation of a mobile manipulator. The local robot is a revolute-joint manipulator, with a bounded workspace, and the remote robot is a revolute-joint manipulator mounted on a non-holonomic mobile platform (mobile manipulator), with an unbounded workspace. The local manipulator acts as a pose (position and orientation) joystick, with force feedback, driving a velocity controlled remote mobile manipulator. The proposed scheme ensures that the remote end-effector velocity globally and asymptotically converges to a proportional part of the local end-effector pose. Simulations, using a two degree-of-freedom manipulator mounted on a differential non-holonomic platform, are shown to illustrate the performance of this proposal.