Robust damping control of mobile manipulators

In this paper, a novel robust control technique, robust damping control (RDC), is introduced. An RDC controller is further developed for the motion control of mobile manipulator subject to kinematic constraints. The knowledge of dynamics parameters of the mobile manipulator is assumed to be completely unknown. The proposed RDC controller is capable of disturbance-rejection in the presence of unknown bounded disturbance, without requiring the knowledge of its bound. The stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed. The controller has a simple structure and can be easily implemented in applications. Experimental tests on a 2-DOF robotic manipulator illustrate that the proposed control is significantly better than conventional robust control.