Building a mobile manipulator from off-the-shelf components

A number of mobile manipulators have been custom engineered and built in labs worldwide. Mobile manipulators could become much more prevalent if they were assembled from commercially available components instead of being locally engineered and built. In this paper, we describe some tests and the integration steps in putting together power source, computers, and distributed software systems for integrating two Barrett WAM arms on top of a Segway RMP mobile base. The description is meant to be accessible so that researchers without engineering lab access or experience can make use of them. We conclude by showing initial experiments with two arm manipulation.