A study on optimal configuration for the mobile manipulator considering the minimal movement

A mobile manipulator-a serial connection of a mobile robot and a task robot-is redundant by itself. Using its redundant freedom, a mobile manipulator can perform various tasks. In this paper, to improve task execution efficiency utilizing the redundancy, optimal configurations of the mobile manipulator are maintained while it is moving to a new task point. Using a cost function for optimality defined as a combination of the square errors of the desired and actual configurations of the mobile robot and of the task robot, the job which the mobile manipulator performs is optimized. Here, the proposed algorithm is experimentally verified and discussed with a mobile manipulator, PURL-II.