In many industries, it is no longer possible to imagine factories without the support of robotization in the form of robotic manipulators. The manipulators are mostly fixed, as they can efficiently perform the required tasks within their working reach. In the case of requirements for greater reach, it is necessary to use mobile manipulators, where the manipulator is attached to a mobile platform. The latter requires a more advanced localization and guidance algorithms.
In the master’s thesis, we solved the problem of controlling a redundant non-holonomic mobile manipulator. We used a robotic system consisting of a Pal Tiago Base mobile platform, on which Emiko Frank's Panda robotic manipulator was installed. We created two different kinematics models for the robot system. In the first model, we used differential drive kinematics equations to guide the joints of the mobile platform. In the second model, we modelled the mobile platform as a combination of virtual rotational and virtual translational joints. We developed and tested various optimizations to solve the redundancy problem of the composite robot system. We oriented the mobile platform towards the target point while guiding the robot to solve the problem of non-holonomic limitations of the drive, by optimizing the angle between the platform and the point. We developed a guidance algorithm which we tested in a simulation and real environment. Measurements of the position of the platform and the manipulator were captured using the OptiTrack system, when guiding the robot in a real environment. For the test, we imagined two different paths of points along which we (in the simulation) guided our robot. We found that optimizing the manipulability of the top of the robot improves trajectory tracking but the robot enters the limit positions of the joint values, and as a result cannot continue its task. By using optimization to reach the desired position of the joints, we solved the problem of the joints moving into their final positions but worsened the quality of trajectory tracking.
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