Mission Design of Mobile Manipulators in Cluttered Environments for Service Applications

The purpose of this paper is to present a mission design approach for a service mobile manipulator which is moving and manipulating objects in partly known indoor environments. The mobile manipulator is requested to pick up and place objects on predefined places (stations). The proposed approach is based on the Bump-Surface concept to represent robot's environment through a single mathematical entity. The solution of the mission design problem is searched on a higher dimension Bump-Surface in such a way that its inverse image into the actual robot environment satisfies the given objectives and constraints. The problem's objectives consist of determining the best feasible paths for both the mobile platform and for the manipulator's end-effector so that all the stations are served at the lowest possible cost. Simulation examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the presented approach.