Planning an Efficient and Robust Base Sequence for a Mobile Manipulator Performing Multiple Pick-and-place Tasks
This work addresses incremental improvements in mobile manipulation for industrial part-supply tasks, focusing on efficiency and robustness in real-world applications.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently and robustly collecting objects from multiple trays using a mobile manipulator by planning a base sequence that reduces movements and handles positioning uncertainty, with experiments showing improved efficiency and real-world feasibility.
In this paper, we address efficiently and robustly collecting objects stored in different trays using a mobile manipulator. A resolution complete method, based on precomputed reachability database, is proposed to explore collision-free inverse kinematics (IK) solutions and then a resolution complete set of feasible base positions can be determined. This method approximates a set of representative IK solutions that are especially helpful when solving IK and checking collision are treated separately. For real world applications, we take into account the base positioning uncertainty and plan a sequence of base positions that reduce the number of necessary base movements for collecting the target objects, the base sequence is robust in that the mobile manipulator is able to complete the part-supply task even there is certain deviation from the planned base positions. Our experiments demonstrate both the efficiency compared to regular base sequence and the feasibility in real world applications.