In order to resolve the redundancy of a wheeled mobile redundant manipulator comprising a twowheel-drive mobile platform and a 6-degree-of-freedom manipulator, a physical-limits-constrained (PLC) minimum velocity norm (MVN) coordinating scheme (termed as PLC-MVN-C scheme) is proposed and investigated. Such a scheme can not only coordinate the mobile platform and the manipulator to fulfill the e...

In this paper we suggest an entirely new strategy for the dexterous manipulation of a linear flexible object, such as rope or a cable, with a high-speed manipulator. We deal with a flexible rope as one example of the linear flexible object. The strategy involves manipulating the object at highspeed. By moving the robot at high-speed, we can assume that the dynamic behaviour of the flexible rope...

In this article, we present generic hierarchical behavior-based architecture model for driving mobile manipulator robots. Two behaviors are of high-level. They constitute the Supervisory agent, which manages the global system. Two others are of intermediate-level and finally one behavior is of low-level. These last ones constitute the Mobile Robot agent and the Manipulator Robot agent controlli...

We present a novel approach for mobile manipulator self-calibration using contact information. Our method, based on point cloud registration, is applied to estimate the extrinsic transform between a fixed vision sensor mounted on a mobile base and an end effector. Beyond sensor calibration, we demonstrate that the method can be extended to include manipulator kinematic model parameters, which i...

We present a Hierarchical and Adaptive Mobile Manipulator Planner (HAMP) that plans for both the base and the arm in a judicious manner allowing the manipulator to change its configuration autonomously when needed if the current arm configuration is in collision with the environment as the mobile manipulator moves along the planned path. This is in contrast to current implemented approaches tha...

In this paper we provide a description of the LUHbots team. We describe the current state of the team as well as current plans and research goals towards the 2016 RoboCup@Work tournament in Leipzig. The software is based upon a ROS-architecture and the hardware uses a KUKA youBot as a basis. The focus of the team lies with failure tolerant approaches to mobile manipulation.

We describe a robot system that autonomously acquires skills through interaction with its environment. The robot learns to sequence the execution of a set of innate controllers to solve a task, extracts and retains components of that solution as portable skills, and then transfers those skills to reduce the time required to learn to solve a second task.

Mobile manipulator systems comprising of a mobile platform with one or more manipulators are of great interest in a number of applications. This paper presents a modeling of the system without violating the nonholonomic constraints of the platform. Trajectory planning by soft motion and seventh order polynomial to control jerk acceleration, and velocity, is also presented. The hub torque requir...

In this article we present a scheme for mobile manipulation by introducing a Mobile Manipulation Control Architecture (MMCA). This architecture is motivated by a need for a systematic control structure for robotic manipulation within a behavior based framework. The control structure enables integration of the manipulator into a behavior based control structure for the platform. Furthermore, our...