Whole-body Control of Non-holonomic Mobile Manipulator Based on Hierarchical Quadratic Programming and Continuous Task Transition

Whole-body manipulation for a non-holonomic mobile manipulator has potential in various fields including service and industrial robotics because it can provide a great deal of manipulation capability and mobility. This paper presents the whole-body controller of the non-holonomic mobile manipulator for achieving complex tasks effectively. The proposed controller is designed based on Hierarchical Quadratic Programming (HQP). Thus, the controller can deal with both equality and inequality tasks. Moreover, by applying the continuous task transition strategy, our controller can compute the continuous control input when the priorities of the tasks are changed. The proposed control scheme was implemented on a mobile base with a 7 DoFs robotic arm and its performance was validated during various experimental scenarios.