Abstract
A mobile manipulator consisting of a 6 d.o.f manipulator and an omni-directional moving platform with four wheels is developed. The four wheels are controlled by DC servo motors respectively in order to position the moving platform on the ground. The system has torque redundancy which can be used for improving the control performance of the moving platform. A criterion for exploiting the redundancy is proposed to avoid the slippage of wheels, and fundamental experiments are done to show the control characteristics of the developed mobile platform.
