Mobile Manipulation Platform for Autonomous Indoor Inspections in Low-Clearance Areas (2309.10794v1)
Abstract: Mobile manipulators have been used for inspection, maintenance and repair tasks over the years, but there are some key limitations. Stability concerns typically require mobile platforms to be large in order to handle far-reaching manipulators, or for the manipulators to have drastically reduced workspaces to fit onto smaller mobile platforms. Therefore we propose a combination of two widely-used robots, the Clearpath Jackal unmanned ground vehicle and the Kinova Gen3 six degree-of-freedom manipulator. The Jackal has a small footprint and works well in low-clearance indoor environments. Extensive testing of localization, navigation and mapping using LiDAR sensors makes the Jackal a well developed mobile platform suitable for mobile manipulation. The Gen3 has a long reach with reasonable power consumption for manipulation tasks. A wrist camera for RGB-D sensing and a customizable end effector interface makes the Gen3 suitable for a myriad of manipulation tasks. Typically these features would result in an unstable platform, however with a few minor hardware and software modifications, we have produced a stable, high-performance mobile manipulation platform with significant mobility, reach, sensing, and maneuverability for indoor inspection tasks, without degradation of the component robots' individual capabilities. These assertions were investigated with hardware via semi-autonomous navigation to waypoints in a busy indoor environment, and high-precision self-alignment alongside planar structures for intervention tasks.
- CIGRE, Technical Brochure 807. ‘‘Application of Robotics in Substations.’’ WG B3.47 (2020): pp. 1–156.
- ‘‘Coordinating Locomotion and Manipulation of a Mobile Manipulator.’’ [1992] Proceedings of the 31st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control: pp. 2643–2648. 1992. IEEE. 10.1109/CDC.1992.371337.
- Khatib, Oussama. ‘‘Mobile Manipulation: The Robotic Assistant.’’ Robotics and Autonomous Systems Vol. 26 No. 2-3 (1999): pp. 175–183. 10.1016/S0921-8890(98)00067-0.
- ‘‘Centauro: A Hybrid Locomotion and High Power Resilient Manipulation Platform.’’ IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Vol. 4 No. 2 (2019): pp. 1595–1602. 10.1109/LRA.2019.2896758.
- ‘‘EL-E: an Assistive Mobile Manipulator that Autonomously Fetches Objects from Flat Surfaces.’’ Autonomous Robots Vol. 28 (2010): pp. 45–64. URL https://hdl.handle.net/1853/37073.
- ‘‘Robotic Home Assistant Care-O-bot® 3-Product Vision and Innovation Platform.’’ 2009 IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts: pp. 139–144. 2009. IEEE. 10.1109/ARSO.2009.5587059.
- ‘‘The Design of Stretch: A Compact, Lightweight Mobile Manipulator for Indoor Human Environments.’’ 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA): pp. 3150–3157. 2022. IEEE. 10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811922.
- ‘‘Omnivil—an Autonomous Mobile Manipulator for Flexible Production.’’ Sensors Vol. 20 No. 24 (2020): p. 7249. 10.3390/s20247249.
- ‘‘Kuka youBot-a Mobile Manipulator for Research and Education.’’ 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation: pp. 1–4. 2011. IEEE. 10.1109/ICRA.2011.5980575.
- ‘‘A Robust and Rapidly Deployable Waypoint Navigation Architecture for Long-Duration Operations in GPS-Denied Environments.’’ 2023 20th International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR): pp. 319–326. 2023. IEEE. 10.1109/UR57808.2023.10202392.