Control of two Wheeled Welding Mobile Manipulator

A three-linked manipulator mounted on a two-wheeled mobile platform is used to weld a long curved welding path. A welding torch mounted at the end of a manipulator of the welding mobile manipulator (WMM) must be controlled for tracking a welding path with constant velocity and constant welding angle of torch. In this paper, a decentralized control method is applied to control the WMM considered as two separate subsystems such as a mobile platform and a manipulator. Two decentralized motion controllers are designed to control two subsystems of WMM, respectively. Firstly, based on a tracking error vector of the manipulator and a feedback motion of the mobile platform, a kinematic controller is designed for manipulator. Secondly, based on an another tracking error vector of the mobile platform and a feedback angular velocities of revolution joints of three-link, a sliding mode controller is designed for the mobile platform. These controllers are obtained based on the Lyapunov's function and its stability condition to ensure for the tracking error vectors to be asymptotically stable. Furthermore, simulation and experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.