Redundancy modelling and resolution for robotic mobile manipulators: a general approach

In this work the topic of kinematic redundancy modelling and resolution for robotic mobile manipulators is considered. A set of redundancy parameters is introduced to define a general inverse kinematic procedure for mobile manipulators. Then, redundancy is treated as a non-linear optimization problem with the purpose of finding robot configurations that maximize the designed metric measures. Some strategies to design the optimization objective function are introduced in order to achieve desirable redundant behaviours, such as obstacles avoidance, mobile base motions reductions and dexterity optimization. Moreover, the robot controller has been developed following an object-oriented software architecture principle that allows to keep it general and robot independent. As a prove of reliability and generality of our approach, the same controller has been used to control several different mobile manipulators in a simulation environment, as well as a real KUKA youBot robot.