Consolidating Kinematic Models to Promote Coordinated Mobile Manipulations
This work addresses coordination challenges for service robots in complex household environments, representing an incremental improvement over methods that optimize components separately.
The paper tackles the problem of coordinating mobile base, arm, and object kinematics in mobile manipulation by introducing a Virtual Kinematic Chain (VKC) that consolidates them into a single model, enabling motion planning via trajectory optimization and resulting in improved task success rates and more efficient trajectories in simulations.
We construct a Virtual Kinematic Chain (VKC) that readily consolidates the kinematics of the mobile base, the arm, and the object to be manipulated in mobile manipulations. Accordingly, a mobile manipulation task is represented by altering the state of the constructed VKC, which can be converted to a motion planning problem, formulated, and solved by trajectory optimization. This new VKC perspective of mobile manipulation allows a service robot to (i) produce well-coordinated motions, suitable for complex household environments, and (ii) perform intricate multi-step tasks while interacting with multiple objects without an explicit definition of intermediate goals. In simulated experiments, we validate these advantages by comparing the VKC-based approach with baselines that solely optimize individual components. The results manifest that VKC-based joint modeling and planning promote task success rates and produce more efficient trajectories.