Considerable research attentions have recently been paid toward a mobile manipulator (a robot arm standing on a mobile platform) due to its extended workspace beyond the manipulator reach. Mobile manipulators have a wide range of potential applications where it is desirable to achieve higher degree of flexibility in transport and handling task. However, a vast number of research publications only focus on trajectory planning. This preliminary research work presents dynamic modeling and analysis of a mobile flexible robot arm with aims to provide insights for the design and control of such mobile robot manipulators. In this work, the dynamic model is developed using a computationally efficient method: Discrete Time Transfer Matrix Method (DT-TMM). The concepts and principle of DT-TMM are briefly overviewed, and then are applied to a mobile flexible robot arm for dynamic modeling with the detailed procedure. Numerical simulations and dynamic analyses are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic modeling method, and to provide the clues for our ongoing research work in the design and control of mobile robot manipulators.
