Automatic insertion of a long-pipe by a mobile manipulator with exchangeable active/passive joints

To construct a practical system using a mobile manipulator, a new mobile manipulator with exchangeable active/passive joints has been developed by authors. In the mobile manipulator, passive joints play an important role in absorbing the mobile positioning error and reducing the internal force passively. By utilizing the exchangeable active/passive joints, a control algorithm. for automatic insertion of a long pipe based only on the angular information of the passive joints is proposed. By implementing the algorithm to the mobile manipulator, the insertion task was performed successfully. The proposed control algorithm is described and the experimental results are shown in this paper