Design and Implementation of Mobile Manipulator System

In this paper, we develop and implement a kind of mobile manipulator named Jupiter, which consists of a six-degree-of-freedom(DOF) manipulator and an omnidirectional mobile platform with four actively steerable wheels. In contrast to the omnidirectional mobile manipulator with Mecanum wheels, the proposed mobile manipulator can be adopted in rough terrains. Two laser scanners and a stereo camera are mounted in the system to perceive the environment. With the IMU and odometry data, Jupiter is capable of doing SLAM by Hector SLAM method and path planning. A manipulation frameworks with a single shot multibox detector (SSD) approach is used to detect and grasp the objects. Combining the two function, both the manipulator and the platform are integrated into a system which can execute mobile manipulation tasks autonomously. Our contribution includes a complete hardware construction and software pipeline of the mobile manipulator which is capable of autonomously doing SLAM, navigation, detecting and grasping objects. The performance of the system are tested and proved by autonomously executing an mobile manipulation mission including autonomous navigation with multi-sensors and apples grasping and placing.