Mobile Manipulation: Toward Smart Manufacturing [TC Spotlight]

The goal of autonomous mobile manipulation is the execution of complex manipulation tasks in both structured and unstructured environments, possibly in cooperation or close interaction with human beings. This entails challenges in different fields: perception, navigation, task and path planning, control, error recovery, and human-robot interaction. Each field is an area of research on its own, but the special challenge in mobile manipulation is to obtain an integrated system that can combine a large variety of hardware and software components to increase the tasks that the robot can perform, while decreasing the dependency on a priori information and increasing the awareness of the robot to its current situation. Challenges in the field arise from the high-dimensional spaces associated to systems with high number of actuators and sensors, uncertainty in perception and execution of the tasks, generality of the solutions required to manipulate objects in the real world, and engineering and scientific complexity of the systems required for these tasks.