Manipulation of a Mobile Modular Manipulator Interacting with the Environment with the Assistance of Tactile Sensing Feedback

This paper presents a modeling method for a mobile modular manipulator (MMM) interacting with the environment, which is composed of a mobile base and a 5-DOF manipulator. A tactile sensor, which is installed at the tip of the end-effector of the mobile manipulator, is to detect the feedback information from the environment. The dynamic equations are formulated and the controller is proposed with both the redundancy resolution and manipulability measures. The tactile sensing-assisted strategies are proposed and combined into the control algorithm. A real mobile manipulator is built up to contact with the environment in our lab and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.