Robust damping control of mobile manipulators.

A novel robust control technique, robust damping control (RDC), is introduced. An RDC controller is further developed for the motion control of a mobile manipulator subject to kinematic constraints. The knowledge of dynamic 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.