Mobile Manipulation in Unknown Environments with Differential Inverse Kinematics Control

Mobile manipulators combine the large workspace of mobile robots with the interactive capabilities of manipulator arms, making them useful in a variety of domains including construction and assistive care. We propose a differential inverse kinematics whole-body control approach for position-controlled industrial mobile manipulators. Our controller is capable of task-space trajectory tracking, force regulation, obstacle and singularity avoidance, and pushing an object toward a goal location, with limited sensing and knowledge of the environment. We evaluate the proposed approach through extensive experiments on a 9 degree-of-freedom omnidirectional mobile manipulator. A video demonstrating many of the experiments can be found at http://tiny.cc/crv21-mm.