Adaptive and safe mobile manipulator for human robot interaction

Mobile robotic manipulators will be more and more present in our daily life. Many applications use already these platforms such as for homecare, industrial logistics, etc. and most of the time with in vicinity of humans, within dynamic and unknown environments. This poses the problem of adaptability and safety: robots should adapt to support a wide range of human users behaviors, with a strong guaranty of users´ safety. In addition, such functions should take place with environments that are dynamic and not known a priori. This contribution reports on the mobile manipulator we are developing. We focus on solving the safe path planning problem for both the robot base and the robot manipulator in the presence of humans and dynamic obstacles: a safety distance should be strictly maintained by the robot with regard to the person involved in the interactive task as well as with any other person or moving object potentially colliding with the robot while performing the assigned task. These two requirements are achieved in real time by a multi-objective optimization that controls the base and the manipulator based on the task definition and the sensing data provided by the embedded sensors. Simulated scenarios have been tested and the obtained results are presented and discussed.