Mobile manipulation and visual servoing design of a configurable mobile manipulator

This paper presents a mobile manipulation and visual servoing design for a configurable mobile manipulator by using a Kinect sensor. To achieve this goal, an image-based grasping design is combined with a visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM). The proposed vSLAM method is based on extended Kalman filter (EKF) and a Kinect RGBD sensor. In the manipulator design, the robot arms are designed to be able to configure as a handrail for user support in execution of walking assistance tasks. The purpose of this design is to perform mobile manipulation and walking assistance tasks on the same robot. Experiments on the prototype dual-arm mobile manipulator validate that the proposed method can find and grasp a target object after navigation a distance to the object position. After the robot delivered the object to the user, it configured to provide walking assist to the user using the suggested compliance controller.