Performance Measurement of Mobile Manipulators

This paper describes a concept for measuring the reproducible performance of mobile manipulators to be used for assembly or other similar tasks. An automatic guided vehicle with an onboard robot arm was programmed to repeatedly move to and stop at a novel, reconfigurable mobile manipulator artifact (RMMA), sense the RMMA, and detect targets on the RMMA. The manipulator moved a laser retroreflective sensor to detect small reflectors that can be reconfigured to measure various manipulator positions and orientations (poses). This paper describes calibration of a multi-camera, motion capture system using a 6 degree-of-freedom metrology bar and then using the camera system as a ground truth measurement device for validation of the reproducible mobile manipulator’s experiments and test method. Static performance measurement of a mobile manipulator using the RMMA has proved useful for relatively high tolerance pose estimation and other metrics that support standard test method development for indexed and dynamic mobile manipulator applications.