Four-wheel, independently driven skid-steer mobile robots have been widely used in some fields, such as indoor product shipping and outdoor inspection and exploration. Traditional skid-steer mobile robot controllers often use a kinematics controller to obtain the desired speed of each wheel, complete speed closed-loop control of each wheel and achieve the robot’s trajectory tracking control. However, the controller based on kinematics may lead to robot chattering and wheel spin from being directly driven by the motor on uneven grounds. To solve these problems, we developed a four-wheel, independently driven skid-steer mobile robot with a damping module for the timing-belt servo system and proposed a model-based coordinated trajectory tracking control method with the timing-belt servo system. First, the kinematics and dynamics of the mobile robot are established, including the chassis kinematics and dynamics, as well as the dynamics of the timing-belt servo system. Secondly, the hierarchical control law is designed, which has adaptive robust control of the upper-level robot chassis, middle-level control allocation approach, and adaptive robust control of the bottom-level timing-belt servo system. Finally, the proposed method is verified by the robot’s trajectory tracking control comparison simulation experiments and has a better control performance.

The space cable-driven continuous manipulator (SCCM) has a slender structure, ultra-high degrees of freedom, and a low mass, which make it suitable for equipment inspection and maintenance operations in an unstructured and limited space environment. In this paper, the SCCM including the cable network and plenty of joint links was deeply modeled. Firstly, the mapping relationship between the cable-driving space, joint space, and task space of the SCCM was studied, and the complete kinematic relationship of the SCCM was established. Secondly, the stiffness components of the SCCM are discussed, and the stiffness modeling method of each part is given. Finally, the Cartesian space equivalent stiffness model of the end was established. Then, a dynamic co-modeling method of Matlab + Adams is proposed, which greatly improved the modeling efficiency while ensuring the modeling accuracy. Finally, based on the stiffness model, the end stiffness characteristics of a specific configuration were analyzed, and the influence of the cable tension on the stiffness and frequency of the manipulator was analyzed. Based on the dynamic co-modeling, the task trajectory dynamics’ simulation analysis and space slit crossing experiment were carried out, which verified that the designed SCCM can meet the needs of slit crossing.