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

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. Copyright © 2006 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.