This paper describes the problem of designing control laws for path following robots, including two types of nonholonomic mobile manipulators. Due to a cascade structure of the motion equation, a backstepping procedure is used to achieve motion along a desired path. The control algorithm consists of two simultaneously working controllers: the kinematic controller, solving motion constraints, and the dynamic controller, preserving an appropriate coordination between both subsystems of a mobile manipulator,...

An application of advanced optimization techniques to solve the path planning problem for closed chain robot systems is proposed. The approach to path planning is formulated as a “quasi-dynamic” NonLinear Programming (NLP) problem with equality and inequality constraints in terms of the joint variables. The essence of the method is to find joint paths which satisfy the given constraints and minimize the proposed performance index. For numerical solution of the NLP problem, the IPOPT solver is used,...