Assistive mobile manipulators have the potential to one day serve as surrogates and helpers for people with disabilities, giving them the freedom to perform tasks such as scratching an itch, picking up a cup, or socializing with their families. This article introduces a collaborative project with the goal of putting assistive mobile manipulators into real homes to work with people with disabili...

In medicine and industry, there is a need for flexible multirobot platforms that allow for independent placement of multiple robotic manipulators. The Computer Aided Medical Procedures research group at Johns Hopkins University has developed a multi-robot surgical platform with two KUKA iiwa robotic manipulators. Each KUKA system is built into a mobile workstation, which makes them easy to tran...

In this paper, a flexible robotic assembly system with decentralized architecture is presented. The system is designed to achieve high reconfigurability so that it can adapt to changes in manufacturing environment; a new robot can be easily installed to the system and execute assembly tasks immediately, together with other devices. For easier reconfiguration, a semi-automated calibration method...

Mobile robots that consist of a mobile platform with one or many manipulators, are of great interest in a number of applications. This paper presents a methodology for generating paths and trajectories for both the mobile platform and the manipulator that will take a system from an initial configuration to a pre-specified final one, without violating the nonholonomic constraint. The generated p...

We present a rollover prevention control law for wheeled mobile manipulators based on the invariance control framework, and that makes use of recursively calculated analytic gradients of the mobile manipulator’s zero moment point. Our controller relaxes many of the assumptions made in existing approaches, and enhances robustness through the use of exact gradient information. Numerical experimen...

We apply the Fourier transform on the discrete-motion group to the problem of computing the configuration-space obstacles of mobile robots which move among static obstacles, the problem of finding the workspace density of binary manipulators with many actuators, and the problem of determining workspace boundaries of manipulators with continuous-motion actuators. We develop and implement Fourier...

ABSTRACT Two recently developed motion control algorithms for mobile manipulators are applied to an experimental system. The manipulator motions induce significant dynamic interactions with its vehicle and suspension. A conventional fixed-base controller, which typically neglects these dynamic interactions, is shown to lead to poor performance. Both mobile manipulator control algorithms, howeve...

This paper introduces an event-based decentralized control scheme for the cooperation between multiple manipulators. This is in contrast to the common practice of using only centralized controls for such cooperation which, consequently, greatly limit the flexibility of robotic systems. The manipulators used in the present system are very simple with only two degrees of freedom, while even one o...

In this paper we present a new methodology to achieve visionbased control using a mobile manipulator to reach a required threedimensional target position and orientation. Examples of mobile manipulators include standard forklifts and backhoes, which have a fixed manipulator mounted on a mobile platform. The overall objective of this methodology is to apply the nonholonomic degrees of freedom re...