Efficiency of Double Nonholonomic Mobile Manipulators

Abstract

Abstract This paper deals with the problem of defining performance measures of doubly nonholonomic mobile manipulators composed of a nonholonomic mobile platform and a nonholonomic manipulator mounted on the platform. We introduce the kinematic theory of such mobile manipulators in frame of the endogenous configuration space approach, which assumes that: the kinematics of mobile manipulators is represented by a pair of driftless control systems driven by platform and manipulator controls, and sharing output function that describes position and orientation of the end-effector; the kinematic performance measures refer to the analytic Jacobian of the system; a locally controllable system yields nontrivial performance measures. Our results consist in a definition of the following local performance characteristics: the dexterity ellipsoid, the local dexterity, the energy efficiency and the motion efficiency. The usefulness of new local measures is demonstrated on the example of determining efficient configurations of a 3 d.o.f. planar nonholonomic manipulator fixed to a kinematic car type platform.