Motion Planning for a Mobile Manipulator with Redundant DOFs

This paper investigates how to track a desired trajectory by a mobile manipulator that has redundant degrees of freedom (DOFs). Based on the analysis of its kinematics models, a motion planning method is proposed. The position and orientation of the end-effector is decomposed into two parts. In the first part, the manipulator contributes sub-vectors projected on the Z-axis in the world frame, including position and orientation. In the second part, the mobile base and the manipulator move along the direction of the desired path and reach the sub-vectors on axes X and Y in the world frame respectively. Simulated results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Keyword: Mobile manipulator, Redundant DOFs, Insufficient DOFs, Path planning, Trajectory tracking.