Abstract
This paper presents an adaptive tracking control method for a welding mobile manipulator with several unknown parameters such as the last length of the manipulator, the wheel radius and the distance from the center to the wheel. The mobile manipulator consisted of the manipulator and the mobile-platform. Kinematic modelings for the manipulator and the mobile-platform with several unknown parameters were produced. The tracking error vectors for the manipulator and the mobile-platform were defined. These adaptive controllers were designed based on the Lyapunov function to guarantee the stability of the whole system when the mobile manipulator performs a welding task. Update laws were also designed to estimate the unknown dimensional parameters. To implement the designed controllers, a control system integrated with PIC16F877 microprocessors and a TMS320C32 DSP was developed. Simulation and experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.