Nonholonomic Manipulators

This focused monograph on nonholonomic manipulators builds upon an increasing interest in nonholonomic mechanical systems in robotics and control engineering. The scope of this book is the definition and development of new nonholonomic machines which are designed on the basis of nonlinear control theory for nonholonomic mechanical systems. A key feature of the work is the possibility to exploit nonholonomic theory to design innovative mechanical systems with a reduced number of actuators without reducing the size of their controllable space. The book offers a comprehensive treatment of the problem from the theoretical development of the various control schemes to prototyping new types of manipulators, while testing their performance by simulation and experiments in a number of significant cases.