Mobile Manipulation in Unknown Environments with Differential Inverse Kinematics Control

Abstract

Mobile manipulators combine the large workspace of mobile robots with the interactive capabilities of manipulator arms, making them useful in a variety of domains including construction and assistive care. We propose a differential inverse kinematics whole-body control approach for position-controlled industrial mobile manipulators. Our controller is capable of task-space trajectory tracking, force regulation, obstacle and singularity avoidance, and pushing an object toward a goal location, with limited sensing and knowledge of the environment. We evaluate the proposed approach through extensive experiments on a 9 degree-of-freedom omnidirectional mobile manipulator. A video demonstrating many of the experiments can be found at http://tiny.cc/crv21-mm.