Advanced Collaborative Mobile Manipulator for 3D Navigation and Manipulation (ARD/274)

A Collaborative Mobile Manipulator (CMM) is a robotic platform composed of a mobile robot and a manipulator for providing mobility, sensing and dexterity capabilities to work collaboratively with human operators. Although there have been many successful cases of deploying CMMs in known and structured working environments, fundamental challenges remain when they are required to handle sophisticated 3D objects in unstructured and cluttered environments. This project aims at developing the technological foundations for the next generation of Advanced Collaborative Mobile Manipulator to navigate in more complex 3D environments and to conduct more flexible manipulation to meet the increasing demands of Smart Factory in I4.0. Challenges encountered in current robotic systems used by industrial customers include difficulties in building a proper map of the large-scale complex environments owing to the accumulation of sensor noise and computation errors, lack of robust obstacle avoidance capability in unstructured environments, and lack of reliable pick-and-place motion capability in cluttered environments resulted from limited sensing and manipulation capability. The project will develop the advanced algorithms and software packages to overcome these fundamental challenges for enabling 1) Mapping of 3D Unstructured Environments; 2) Path Planning for Navigation in 3D Unstructured Environments; and 3) Motion Planning for Manipulation in 3D Cluttered Environments. Although developed for CMMs, the technology is also suitable for purely mobile robots or robot arms. The developed technology can provide a leading solution for industrial customers to enable them for deploying more robotic systems on more sophisticated tasks in order to fulfill the increasing demands of the digitalization of manufacturing facilities.