Title: A synchronisation approach to mutual error compensation in controlling the vehicle with an installed manipulator

Authors: Dong Sun

Addresses: Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Abstract: Precise tracking control of a vehicle with an installed manipulator is a challenging problem, in which tracking errors of the vehicle and the manipulator merge and jointly affect the endpoint trajectory performance. A new study using the synchronisation approach to control the vehicle-manipulator system is reported in this paper. The basic idea is to utilise the cross-coupling concept to cooperate motions of the vehicle and the manipulator so that the tracking errors are compensated by each other. A synchronisation error is defined to measure this coordination. An adaptive synchronised controller is proposed to guarantee asymptotic convergence to zero of the position tracking error and the synchronisation error of the mobile manipulator. The controller is in a decentralised architecture for easy implementation, and is able to address the model uncertainty problem. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Keywords: adaptive control; cross-coupling; error compensation; mobile manipulators; synchronisation; vehicle design; vehicle control; tracking control; trajectory tracking; tracking errors; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVD.2006.010434

International Journal of Vehicle Design, 2006 Vol.42 No.3/4, pp.287 - 305

Published online: 21 Jul 2006 *

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