Grasping on the move: A generic arm-base coordinated grasping pipeline for mobile manipulation

In robotics, grasping is often considered as an isolated topic which is independent of the base position of the operating robot. People place their robots at an empirically predefined position and assume that the desired object is perceivable to the robot and reachable for the robot arm. In case of inappropriate base positions, however, the desired object may become hidden or unreachable, so that the robot can not perform grasping at all. In this paper, we propose a generic grasping pipeline, which achieves arm-base coordinated grasping given the information about object pose and the operating environment. In addition, we propose a method to find the optimal base position for arm-base coordinated grasping. Moreover, we adopt a modular design to realize our grasping pipeline so that it stays as generic as possible. Experiments in simulation and on a real robot show promising results and thus confirm the usefulness of our approach.