Stability-based planning and trajectory tracking of a mobile manipulator over uneven terrains

Abstract

The problem of improving the stability of a mobile manipulator over a sloped terrain is addressed in the present work. Such an improvement is achieved by finding the location of the manipulator's center of mass that maximizes the overall quasi-static stability, defined here as the force-angle stability, using a stochastic optimization approach known as the Covariance Matrix Adaptation. The tracking of both trajectories for the robot base and for the manipulator is achieved by using an inverse-kinematics controller in simulation.