Development of an Autonomous Mobile Manipulator for Pick and Place Operation Using 3D Point Cloud

Abstract

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) are commonly used for tedious processes such as materials transportation and sorting. However, the function of an AGV is quite limited without a manipulator such as a robotic arm. A mobile manipulator can be formed by pairing up both the robotic arm and AGV, which has higher flexibility to conduct different types of tasks. The navigation of AGV is subjected to a certain degree of inaccuracy that needs to be overcome by applying specific compensation techniques such as 3D point clouds for object segmentation. Therefore, this paper will illustrate a solution to build a ROS2-based autonomous mobile manipulator with autonomous navigation, workpiece detection and robotic arm path planning and manipulation.