The paper addresses optimal control problem of mobile manipulators. Dynamic equations of those mechanisms are assumed herein to be uncertain. Moreover, unbounded disturbances act on the mobile manipulator whose end-effector tracks a desired (reference) trajectory given in a task (Cartesian) space. A computationally efficient class of two-stage cascaded (hierarchical) control algorithms based on both the transpose Jacobian matrix and transpose actuation matrix, has been proposed. The offered control laws involve two kinds of non-singular terminal sliding mode (TSM) manifolds, which were also introduced in the paper. The proposed class of cooperating sub-controllers is shown to be finite time stable by fulfilment of practically reasonable assumptions. The performance of the proposed control strategies is illustrated on an exemplary mobile manipulator whose end-effector tracks desired trajectory.

Main topic of the paper is a problem of designing the input-output decoupling controllers for nonholonomic mobile manipulators. We propose a selection of output functions in much more general form than in [1,2]. Regularity conditions guaranteeing the existence of the input-output decoupling control law are presented. Theoretical considerations are illustrated with simulations for mobile manipulator consisting of RTR robotic arm mounted atop of a unicycle which moves in 3D-space.

A method of planning collision-free trajectory for a mobile manipulator tracking a line section path is presented. The reference trajectory of a mobile platform is not needed, mechanical and control constraints are taken into account. The method is based on a penalty function approach and a redundancy resolution at the acceleration level. Nonholonomic constraints in a Pfaffian form are explicitly incorporated to the control algorithm. The problem is shown to be equivalent to some point-to-point control problem whose solution may be easier determined. The motion of the mobile manipulator is planned in order to maximise the manipulability measure, thus to avoid manipulator singularities. A computer example involving a mobile manipulator consisting of a nonholonomic platform (2,0) class and a 3 DOF RPR type holonomic manipulator operating in a three-dimensional task space is also presented.

This paper considers the problem of the accurate task space finite-time control susceptible to both undesirable disturbance forces exerted on the end-effector and unknown friction forces coming from joints directly driven by the actuators as well as unstructured forces resulting from the kinematic singularities appearing on the mechanism trajectory. We obtain a class of estimated extended transposed Jacobian controllers which seem to successfully counteract the external disturbance forces on the basis of a suitably defined task-space non-singular terminal sliding manifold (TSM) and the Lyapunov stability theory. Moreover, in order to overcome (or to minimise) the undesirable chattering effects, the proposed robust control law involves the second-order sliding technique. The numerical simulations (closely related to an experiment) ran for a mobile manipulator consisting of a non-holononic platform of (2;0) type and a holonomic manipulator of two revolute kinematic pairs show the performance of the proposed controllers and make a comparison with other well-known control schemes.