MANIPULATION OF A MOBILE MODULAR MANIPULATOR INTERACTING WITH THE ENVIRONMENT WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF TACTILE SENSING FEEDBACK

Abstract

Since tactile sensing feedback can provide very useful and crucial information to the problems of contact, it can be widely applied in the control of the mobile manipulator in case of contacting with the complex or unknown environments. This paper presents a control method for a mobile modular manipulator (MMM) interacting with the environment, in which the feedback does not only include the force-sensing feedback but also the tactile sensing feedback. In order to detect the feedback information from the environment, a kind of tactile sensor is mounted at the tip of the end-effector of the MMM. The dynamic equations of the whole system are formulated and the hybrid control method is designed after several tactile sensing-assisted strategies are considered. A mobile manipulator is built up to make real experiments and the results validate the proposed methods.