ManIPA: A flexible Manipulation Framework for Collision Avoidance and Robot Control

In this paper a flexible software framework is presented, that allows for the easy configuration, modeling, simulation, and collision avoidance for the manipulators of a service robot. The configuration of the robot including the number of manipulators, their degrees of freedom, the corresponding Denavit-Hartenberg parameters, geometry, fieldbus parameters etc. can be specified easily in xml configuration files. Having configured the robot appropriately, the software provides forward kinematics and a numerical solution to the inverse kinematics of the robot arms. The manipulators can be actuated by a simple control interface which allows movements in joint and cartesian space. According to the parameters given in the configuration files, the robot is modeled by oriented bounding boxes, which are used for collision avoidance calculations. An OpenGL visualisation of the modeled robot is provided, which can be used for simulation. A simple simulation is implemented for robot manipulators with ramp based actuator control. The framework was tested and evaluated with two mobile service robots at Fraunhofer IPA, one of which consists of three manipulators with alltogether 13 degrees of freedom.