Manipulability Enhancement of Legged Manipulators by Adaptive Motion Distribution

Legged manipulators are increasingly prevalent across diverse application domains due to their capacity to maintain manipulability and seamlessly navigate unstructured environments. The motion coordination between the body and the mounted arm is imperative for mobile manipulation tasks. This article proposes a novel adaptive weighted motion adjustment and trajectory tracking framework for a legged manipulator comprising a quadrupedal system. It is a kinematically redundant system with a high degree of freedom (DOF). Our proposed framework facilitates automatic motion distribution to ensure accurate end-effector trajectory tracking. Subsequently, the maximum force pushing task is achieved by optimizing the directional manipulability of the operating arm in the Cartesian and null space. Finally, experimental validation demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed approach in trajectory tracking and heavy box pushing.