Cooperative transportation control of multiple mobile manipulators through distributed optimization

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of distributed control of multiple redundant mobile manipulators to collectively transport an object tracking a desired trajectory with energy and manipulability optimized.To solve this optimization problem, formation control tasks are introduced as equality constraints with the variables being the velocities. In this paper, we propose a distributed proximal gradient algorithm searching for the optimal solution, with which the stability of the closed-loop system is proved. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed optimization scheme and proximal algorithm.