Rollover Prevention of Mobile Manipulators using Invariance Control and Recursive analytic Zmp Gradients

We present a rollover prevention control law for wheeled mobile manipulators based on the invariance control framework, and that makes use of recursively calculated analytic gradients of the mobile manipulator’s zero moment point. Our controller relaxes many of the assumptions made in existing approaches, and enhances robustness through the use of exact gradient information. Numerical experiments demonstrate the improved performance of our controller vis-à-vis existing rollover prevention schemes. 2012 Taylor & Francis and The Robotics Society of Japan