End Effector Driven Whole Body Trajectory Tracking for Mobile Manipulator Based on Linear and Angular Motion Decomposition
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper proposes an end-effector (EE) driven whole-body trajectory tracking control algorithm for wheeled mobile manipulators based on linear and angular motion decomposition. Instead of solving a high-dimensional optimization problem across all degrees of freedom, the proposed method formulates the control objective directly in the EE space and decomposes the required motion into planar linear, vertical, and angular components. To address redundancy between the mobile base and the manipulator under non-holonomic constraints, a control authority switching strategy with a radial blending function is introduced. This approach eliminates ambiguity in control allocation while preventing abrupt switching near workspace boundaries. The kinematic controller guarantees exponential convergence of position and orientation errors without requiring a full dynamic model. Numerical simulations demonstrate stable tracking performance in three-dimensional space. Compared with a quadratic programming-based whole-body controller, the proposed method achieves comparable or faster error convergence while reducing computational burden by more than 13 times on average. These results indicate that the proposed EE-driven framework provides a computationally efficient and practically deployable solution for real-time mobile manipulator control.
Source: Electronics
Authors: Ji-Wook Kwon, Taeyoung Uhm, Ji-Hyun Park, Jongdeuk Lee, Jeong Hwan Hwang
Institution: Korea Institute of Robot and Convergence
Language: English
Subfield: Control and Systems Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,896
OpenAlex ID: W7140603538