This paper presents a system developed with off-the shelf components which will be used to study humanrobot cooperative tasks from tele-manipulation to supervisory control. The approach enables the design to be modular and flexible, thus presenting an upgradable laboratory and test bed for prototyping autonomy-enhanced and supervised-control activities for Space-Analogue Mobile Manipulation.

Human environments possess a significant amount of underlying structure that is under-utilized in motion planning and mobile manipulation. In domestic environments for example, walls and shelves are static, large objects such as furniture and kitchen appliances most of the time do not move and do not change, and objects are typically placed on a limited number of support surfaces such as tables...

In a number of industrial, space, or mobile systems applications, reaction forces and moments transmitted by a manipulator to its base are undesirable. Based on force and moment transmission analysis, a three DOF redundant manipulator design is selected aiming at reactionless motions. Dynamic reaction forces are eliminated by using force balancing. Reaction moments are eliminated by following r...

We describe an integrated strategy for planning, perception, state-estimation and action in complex mobile manipulation domains based on planning in the belief space of probability distributions over states using hierarchical goal regression (pre-image back-chaining). We develop a vocabulary of logical expressions that describe sets of belief states, which are goals and subgoals in the planning...

In this article, we describe efficient methods for tackling everyday mobile manipulation tasks that require object pick-up. In order to achieve real-time performance in complex environments, we focus our approach on fast yet robust solutions. For 3D perception of objects on planar surfaces, we develop scene segmentation methods that process depth images in real-time at high frame rates. We effi...

Mobile manipulators are of high interest to industry because of the increased flexibility and effectiveness they offer. The combination and coordination of the mobility provided by a mobile platform and of the manipulation capabilities provided by a robot arm leads to complex analytical problems for research. These problems can be studied very well on the KUKA youBot, a mobile manipulator desig...

In this paper, we examine creation of a decentralized kinematic control scheme for a composite system of two (or more) wheeled mobile manipulators that can team up to cooperatively transport a common payload. Each mobile manipulator module consists of a differentially-driven wheeled mobile robot (WMR) with a mounted planar two-degree-offreedom (d.o.f) manipulator. A composite multi-degree-offre...

trajectories generally used to describe the space and time required to perform a desired motion task for a mobile robot or manipulator system. in this paper, we considered a cubic polynomial trajectory for the problem of moving a mobile robot from its initial position to a goal position in over a continuous set of time. along the path, the robot requires to observe a certain acceleration profil...