Increasing the flexibility of robot systems has been one of the main objectives of robotics research in recent years. There are various approaches to achieve this: increasing fault-tolerance, the development of new actuators and sensors and the use of learning techniques. But the field of operation of such smart systems is still limited to a rather small area. Mobile manipulation is another facet of increasing the flexibility of a robot system. By exploiting the mobility of a platform, the dextrous workspace of manipulators can be considerably increased. One main research topic on mobile manipulation is the decomposition of the motion of the tool-centre-point into manipulator motion and platform motion. In this paper a new online approach to this decomposition is presented which allows the consideration of complex obstacles and multiple manipulators mounted on the platform. A focus of this paper is the presentation of a fuzzy-controller that enables the robot to perform manipulation and locomotion in an integrated manner.
['Uwe M. Nassal', 'Randy Junge']
Fuzzy control for mobile manipulation