Development and evaluation of autonomous mobile manipulator for large scale outdoor environment

Recently, there has been rapid progress in the development of nondestructive sensing method for underground structures using artificial earthquake and seismometer array technology. However, this requires the deployment of many sensing devices over a wide area on a target outdoor field; such work is currently conducted in manually. To automate such work, our research group has been developing an autonomous mobile manipulator system for automatic rather than manual deployment of sensing devices. To realize such a deployment, the important technical issues are “mobility on rough terrain,” “3D localization,” and “manipulation.” In this research, we designed and implemented these functions in our mobile manipulator system, called “El-Verde,” and conducted field tests to validate its capability and to identify problems when applied in a real environment. In this paper, we introduce its implementation and report the field-test results.