Motion planning for a mobile manipulator to execute a multiple point-to-point task

In this paper, we propose a motion planning method for a mobile manipulator to execute a multiple task which consists of a sequence of point-to-point tasks. In case of multiple task because the motion trajectories between tasks and the commutation configurations are closely related, we formulate the problem as a global non-linear optimization one which takes into account both the motion trajectories and the commutation configurations. In order to simplify the problem, we divide the problem into two subproblems. At the first step, we obtain the motion trajectories assuming that the commutation configurations are given and at the next step, we obtain the optimal commutation configurations by using genetic algorithms. A series of computer simulation results are demonstrated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.