A novel coordinated motion planner based on capability map for autonomous mobile manipulator

Abstract

With the development of the robotic technology, Autonomous Mobile Manipulator (AMM) is increasingly used in more applications. Reasonable motion planning for AMM to maintain high manipulation capability is the prerequisite for the success of the mobile manipulation task. In this paper, the Capability Map (CM) of AMM that gives the distribution of the manipulability in cartesian space is first built. Then given the path of the end effector, we design a novel path planner for the mobile robot by querying CM online so that AMM keeps high manipulability. Moreover, a task-priority coordinated motion controller is developed to control the mobile robot and the manipulator to track their trajectories. In this controller, the trajectory of the manipulator is used as the primary task, and the trajectory of the mobile robot is treated as the constrained task. Simulation results show that the path of the mobile robot can be found online, and AMM follows the trajectories well.