Vision Based Control of a Mobile Manipulator: Design and Implementation

In this book, control of a mobile manipulator system with a calibrated stereo rig is presented. Autonomous mobile manipulator equipped with a vision based target monitoring system can find and track a moving target and also manipulate it. The vision system is utilized to obtain task space feedback for mobile manipulator control. Using vision data, mobile platform (base) and manipulator are controlled with a hybrid visual servo controller and dynamic look and move methodology, respectively. This work also introduces a methodology concerning how the positioning error can be distributed between two mechanical subsystems: base and manipulator. In general these two systems have some degrees of freedom, which correspond to a task space motion capability in the same axis.