Tip-Over Stability Analysis for a Wheeled Mobile Manipulator

Abstract

A method is presented for tip-over stability analysis of a wheeled mobile manipulator. A wheeled mobile manipulator may tip over resulting from its operation. In this study, first a Newton–Euler formulation is applied to formulate the manipulator’s reaction forces and moments exerted onto the mobile platform. Tip-over criterion is derived to judge the system stability. Three load and motion analyses are carried on. The first static load deals with links and payload to show the effect of the horizontal position of the system’s center of gravity (CG). The second and third are the inertial forces resulting from joint speeds and accelerations, respectively. Case study is path planning with tip-over criterion result which can make the system stable along the path. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.