A mobile manipulator is a robot system built from a robotic manipulator arm mounted on a mobile platform.
Description
A mobile robotic system combines the mobility offered by a mobile platform and dexterity offered by the manipulator. The mobile platform offers an extended workspace to the manipulator and more degrees of freedom to operate in. However, the operation of such a system is challenging because of the many degrees of freedom and the unstructured environment that it performs in. A system is generally composed of the mobile platform, the robotic manipulator arm, vision components, and tooling components.
Use cases Mobile manipulation is a subject of focus in development and research environments. Mobile manipulators, either autonomous or remote operated, are used in many areas, such as space exploration, military operations, home care and health care. Within the industrial field, the implementation of mobile manipulators has been limited. The necessary technology entities (mobile platforms, robot manipulators, vision, and tooling) are, to a large extent, available from off-the-shelf components.M. Hvilshøj, S. Bøgh, O. Madsen and M. Kristiansen: The Mobile Robot “Little Helper”: Concepts, ideas and working principles, 14th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, 2009
Few implementations of mobile robots in the industrial field have been reported due to the center of attention being drawn on optimization of the individual technologies, especially robot manipulators A. Albu-Schäffer, S. Haddadin, C. Ott, A. Stemmer, T. Wimböck and G. Hirzinger: The DLR lightweight robot: design and control concepts for robots in human environments, Industrial Robot, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 376–385, 2007 and tooling,H. Liu, P. Meusel, G. Hirzinger, M. Jin and Y. X. Liu: The Modular Multisensory DLR-HIT-Hand: Hardware and Software Architecture, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 461–469, 2008 while the integration, use, and application have been neglected in the field of industrial mobile manipulation. This means that few implementations of mobile robots, in production environments, have been reported – e.g.A. Stopp, S. Horstmann, S. Kristensen and F. Lohnert: Towards Interactive Learning for Manufacturing Assistant, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, pp. 705–707, 2003 and.E. Helms, R. D. Schraft and M. Hägele: rob@work: Robot assistant in industrial environments, Proceedings in IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, pp. 399–404, 2002
Timeline
Year Robot name Company / Research Institute 1984 MORO Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Germany 1992 Hilare 2bis LAAS-CNRS, France 2000 Jaume Robotic Intelligence Lab, Jaume I University, Spain 2004 FAuStO University of Verona, Italy 2006MM-500 Neobotix GmbH, Germany 2009 Little Helper Department of Production, Aalborg University, Denmark 2012 G-WAM Robotnik Automation & Barrett Technologies, Spain & United States 2012 Human Support Robot (HSR) Toyota, Japan 2013 UBR-1 Unbounded Robotics, United States 2013 X-WAMRobotnik Automation & Barrett Technologies, Spain & United States 2015 CARLoS AIMEN, Spain 2015 RB-1 Robotnik Automation & Kinova Robotics, Spain & Canada 2016 TIAGo PAL Robotics, Spain 2018 MuR 205 Institute of Assembly Technology, Leibniz University Hanover, Germany 2024 EMROX Neobotix GmbH, Germany
Video example
One recent example is the mobile manipulator "Little Helper" from the Department of Production at Aalborg University.Research project; Industrial maturation and exploitation of mobile manipulators – more info: MachineVision.dk
See also Cyber-physical system Home automation Remote manipulator Robotic arm
Notes and references