Object handling using Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulator

Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulators (AIMMs) combine the advantages of both mobile robots and industrial manipulators; therefore they have great mobility, flexibility and functionality. However, what the AIMM brings not only bigger operational range, but also lower manipulation accuracy. Great challenges arise in the sensing, calibration and coordination problems. This paper proposes a solution for the coordination problems of an object handling task for AIMM with limited operational range sensors and manipulators. Different from the existing Image Based Visual Servo(IBVS) with single camera-in-hand configuration, a RGB-D camera with camera-to-hand configuration is utilized. The object is detected by matching the color feature on the target object and measured by calibrating and matching the depth image with the RGB image. The hand-eye calibration between the sensor and the manipulator is performed using the specifically chosen object locations which lie in both the range of the two devices. Furthermore, instead of steering the mobile base along a preplanned trajectory, a position based visual servo controller is designed to guide the robot towards the object. The methods are implemented using an AIMM and the experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed coordination and control algorithm.