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Chapter 40 — Mobility and Manipulation

Oliver Brock, Jaeheung Park and Marc Toussaint

Mobile manipulation requires the integration of methodologies from all aspects of robotics. Instead of tackling each aspect in isolation,mobilemanipulation research exploits their interdependence to solve challenging problems. As a result, novel views of long-standing problems emerge. In this chapter, we present these emerging views in the areas of grasping, control, motion generation, learning, and perception. All of these areas must address the shared challenges of high-dimensionality, uncertainty, and task variability. The section on grasping and manipulation describes a trend towards actively leveraging contact and physical and dynamic interactions between hand, object, and environment. Research in control addresses the challenges of appropriately coupling mobility and manipulation. The field of motion generation increasingly blurs the boundaries between control and planning, leading to task-consistent motion in high-dimensional configuration spaces, even in dynamic and partially unknown environments. A key challenge of learning formobilemanipulation consists of identifying the appropriate priors, and we survey recent learning approaches to perception, grasping, motion, and manipulation. Finally, a discussion of promising methods in perception shows how concepts and methods from navigation and active perception are applied.

Mobile robot helper

Author  Kazuhiro Kosuge, Manabu Sato, Norihide Kazamura

Video ID : 788

The mobile robot helper has two 7-DOF arms, force/torque sensors. Named Mr. Helper, it helps people to move objects, using FT sensor and impedance control system.

Free-floating autonomous underwater manipulation: Connector plug/unplug

Author  CIRS Universitat de Girona

Video ID : 789

Peg-in-hole demonstration performed autonomously with an underwater-vehicle manipulator system. The implementation is done through MoveIt!.

Development of a versatile underwater robot - GTS ROV ALPHA

Author  Georgia Tech Savannah Robotics

Video ID : 790

This underwater vehicle won the award for design elegance at the 2009 MATE International ROV competition. In November 2009, it was deployed from the R/V Savannah for an initial sea trial. In the future, it is intended to serve as a platform for underwater manipulation, mapping, and control experiments.