Exponentially Stable Robust Hierarchical Tracking Control for Vehicle-Manipulator Systems

This paper presents a robust enhancement to taskpriority control methodologies for redundant robotic systems, specifically addressing vehicle-manipulator systems (VMS). A novel control law is proposed, which ensures global exponential stability of the tracking errors in non-singular configurations while providing robust performance under bounded disturbances. Additionally, we establish new, stronger stability guarantees for existing methods. The efficacy of the proposed approach is validated through simulations and a comparative study on a 7-DoF Franka Emika robot manipulator, highlighting the performance of the different control approaches in trajectory tracking and robustness. These advancements contribute to the development of robust, autonomous, and energy-efficient robotic systems for complex applications, such as underwater vehicle-manipulator systems (UVMS), enabling safer and more cost-effective operations.