Trajectory Planning for Mobile Manipulators with Control Constraints

This paper presents the method of trajectory planning for mobile manipulators considering limitations resulting from capabilities of robotic system actuators. The fulfillment of control constraints is achieved by introducing virtual control scaling of the robot trajectory in the limited periods of time. Such an approach allows researchers to obtain the trajectories fulfilling control constraints without significantly increasing the time of task execution. The proposed method generates sub-optimal trajectories maximizing the manipulability measure of the robot arm, preserves mechanical and collision avoidance limitations and can be used in real-time trajectory planning. The effectiveness of the presented solution is confirmed by computer simulations involving a mobile manipulator with parameters corresponding to KUKA youBot.