Approaching motion planning for mobile manipulators considering the uncertainty of self-positioning and object’s pose estimation
Kimitoshi Yamazaki, Satoshi Suzuki, Yusuke Kuribayashi
Abstract
This study focuses on the problem of determining the posture of a mobile manipulator aiming to reach a target end-effector pose. Any posture of a mobile manipulator can be described using two parameters: the pose of the mobile platform and the joint angles of the manipulator. This study proposes a posture evaluation method for determining the pose of the mobile platform while focusing on two types of uncertainty: (i) the pose error associated with the end-effector caused by the accumulated positioning error of the mobile platform and (ii) the pose estimation error of objects to be grasped. In addition to using pose errors, the proposed method considers the manipulation ability of the end-effector and the tolerance region for grasping an object by the end-effector. Furthermore, this study proposes a method based on Bayes optimization for finding acceptable moving paths for the mobile platform in environments with sparse obstacles. The effectiveness of the proposed methods was demonstrated through simulations using a mobile manipulator. According to simulation results, the proposed methods can find both moving trajectories for the mobile platform and postures for the mobile manipulator within several seconds.