Reactive Whole-Body Control for Dynamic Mobile Manipulation

In this article, we present a control framework for reactive mobile manipulation of robotic systems with a large number of actuated degrees of freedom (DOF). We apply the concept to the humanoid robot Rollin’ Justin of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). As service robotics is expected to be established in households and human environments in the near future, we consider relevant aspects like safety, compliance and robust task execution. The multi-DOF manipulator achieves an interactive redundancy resolution while planning algorithms only have to be applied to the low-dimensional operational space concerning task execution. Various experiments have been conducted, e. g., on reaching of a remote object, human-robot interaction, and self-collision avoidance of the manipulator. The results can serve as an interface to (re-)planning methods. Thanks to its interactivity, the approach can be applied in dynamic environments.