Wheeled mobile manipulator modeling for task space control

Mobile manipulators have attracted a lot attention lately because they have many advantages over stationary manipulator, such as larger a work space than a stationary manipulator could have in practice. However, the proposed methods in the state of the art to obtain the kinematic model of a mobile manipulator are based in modeling separately the mobile base and the manipulator arm, and later combining both models. This paper shows a systematic approach to obtain the kinematic model of mobile manipulators that transforms in the modeling problem of a stationary manipulator with non-holonomic kinematic constraints in the joints; it is also showed an example of the application of the method, where the kinematic and dynamic models are obtained with extensions of the same tools used in stationary robots.