The coordination of locomotion and manipulation has been the typical and main issue for a mobile manipulator. This is particularly because the solution for the control parameters is redundant and the accuracies of controlling the each joints are different. This paper presents a motion planning method for which the mobile base locomotion is less precise than the manipulator control. In such a case, it is appropriate to move the mobile base to discrete poses and then to move the manipulator to track a prescribed path of the end effector, while the base is stationary. It uses a variant of the conventional manipulability measure that is developed for the trajectory control of the end effector of the mobile manipulator along an arbitrary path in the three dimensional space. The proposed method was implemented on the simulation and the experiments of a mobile manipulator and showed its effectiveness.
