Motion planning of nonholonomic mobile manipulators with manipulability maximization considering joints physical constraints and self-collision avoidance

The motion of nonholonomic mobile manipulators (NMMs) is inherently constrained by joint limits, joint velocity limits, self-collisions and singularities. Most motion planning algorithms consider some of the aforementioned constraints, however, a unified framework to deal with all of them is lacking. This paper proposes a motion planning solution for the kinematic trajectory tracking of redundant NMMs that include all the constraints needed for practical implementation, which improves the manipulability of both the entire system and the manipulator to prevent sin-gularities. Experiments using a 10-DOF NMM demonstrate the good performance of the proposed method for executing 6-DOF trajectories while satisfying all the constraints and simultaneously maximizing manipulability.