Kinematics-based end-effector path control of a mobile manipulator system on an uneven terrain using a two-stage Support Vector Machine

SUMMARYA mobile manipulator system (MMS) consists of a robotic arm mounted on a mobile platform that is used in rescue and relief, space exploration, warehouse automation, etc. As the total system has 14 Degrees of Freedom (DOF), it does not have a closed-form inverse kinematics (IK) solution. A learning-based method is proposed, which uses the forward kinematics data to learn the IK relation for motion of an MMS on a rough terrain, using a one-class support vector machine (SVM) framework. Once trained, the model estimates the joint probability distribution of the MMS configuration and end-effector position. This distribution is used to find the MMS configuration for a given desired end-effector path. Past research using a Kohonen Self organizing map (KSOM) neural network-based open-loop control method has shown that the MMS deviates from its desired path while moving on an uneven terrain due to unknown disturbances such as wheel slip, slide, and terrain deformation. Therefore, a new sequential two-stage SVM-based end-effector path-tracking control scheme is proposed to control the end-effector path. In this scheme, the error in the end-effector path is continuously tracked with the help of a Microsoft Kinect 2.0 (Microsoft Regional Sales, Singapore 119968) and is sent as a feedback to the controller. Once the error reaches a threshold value, the error correction step of the controller gets activated to correct the error until the desired accuracy is reached. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is proved through extensive simulations and experiments conducted on 3D terrain in which it is shown that the end effector can follow the desired path with an average experimental error of around 2 cm between the desired and final corrected path.