Optimal path planning for mobile manipulator based on manipulability and localizability

This paper presents an approach to uncertainty-optimal path planning for a mobile manipulator based on localizability and guarantee manipulability simultaneously. Information matrix is used to indicate the localizability or localization uncertainty in a known map and the cubic Bezier spline is used to represent the path for platform to check. Given a path of end-effector, this algorithm guarantees the manipulability greater than a given value, chooses the uncertainty of end-effector as the optimization index, uses particle swarm optimization algorithm to find an optimal path for platform to track. Simulations and experiments are presented that show the algorithm has the capability to reduce the uncertainty of platform and end-effector.