Obstacle avoidance for mobile manipulation by real-time sensor-based redundancy resolution

Mobile manipulators provide manipulation operations with mobility capacity and have wide potentials in many applications. However, due to the high redundancy, the planning and control become more complicated and difficult, especially when obstacles occur. Most existing methods are based on the off-line algorithms and most of them mainly focus on planning a new collision-free path, which are not appropriate for some applications, such as teleoperation, and cost many system resources as well. Therefore this paper presents an online planning and control method for obstacle avoidance of mobile manipulators using the real-time sensor-based redundancy resolution. This method is implemented on a mobile manipulator with a 7-DOF manipulator and a 4-wheel drive mobile base. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.