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Cooperative transportation control of multiple mobile manipulators through distributed optimization

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Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of distributed control of multiple redundant mobile manipulators to collectively transport an object tracking a desired trajectory with energy and manipulability optimized. To solve this optimization problem, formation control tasks are introduced as equality constraints with the variables being the velocities. In this paper, we propose a distributed proximal gradient algorithm searching for the optimal solution, with which the stability of the closed-loop system is proved. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed optimization scheme and proximal algorithm.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61621063, 61573062, 61603094), in part by Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (Grant No. IRT1208), in part by Beijing Education Committee Cooperation Building Foundation Project (Grant No. 2017CX02005), and in part by Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Intelligent Robots and Systems (Beijing Institute of Technology), Key Laboratory of Biomimetic Robots and Systems (Beijing Institute of Technology), Ministry of Education, Beijing, China. The authors wished to thank Prof. Hao FANG, Dr. Xianlin ZENG, and Dr. Qingkai YANG for constructive comments and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Jie Chen.

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Chen, J., Kai, S. Cooperative transportation control of multiple mobile manipulators through distributed optimization. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 61, 120201 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-018-9588-0

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