Cooperative transportation control of multiple mobile manipulators through distributed optimization

This paper investigates the problem of distributed control of multiple redundant mobile manipulators to collectively transport an object tracking a desired trajectory with energy and manipulability optimized. To solve this optimization problem, formation control tasks are introduced as equality constraints with the variables being the velocities. In this paper, we propose a distributed proximal gradient algorithm searching for the optimal solution, with which the stability of the closed-loop system is proved. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed optimization scheme and proximal algorithm.