Cost-effective Mobile Manipulation System

Present trends in robotics favor machines that can interact with unstructured and dynamic environments. This requires superior mobility and manipulation capabilities in robotic systems which are met by using a mobile manipulator. However, commercially available mobile manipulators tend to be quite expensive making robotics research costly and reserved for a niche community of developers. In this paper, development of a cost-effective mobile manipulation system is proposed. The solution is based on low-cost hardware and open-source software that are both modular. It consists of a robot arm mounted on an omnidirectional mobile platform that can be controlled by a remote computer in order to provide computational resources required for demanding mobile manipulation tasks. The modularity of the proposed robot configuration based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) allows for effortless addition of various sensory devices.