Mobile Manipulation

Conventional automated assembly robots operate affixed to the factory floor in an environment where uncertainty is managed and engineered away by careful human design. This approach has been very successful for production lines, where the majority of parts behave as rigid bodies. In the near future, agile assembly systems will incorporate mobile manipulator robots to make assembly systems adaptable to changing circumstances, including the routine manipulation of soft objects that require many hands to control. We present a constrained optimization method for multi-robot formation control in dynamic environments, where the robots adjust the parameters of the formation to avoid collisions with static and moving obstacles, and to make progress towards their goal. We describe two variants of the algorithm, one for local motion planning and one for global path planning. In particular, we consider the application where a small team of mobile manipulators collaboratively carry an object.