Planning a Minimum Sequence of Positions for Picking Parts From Multiple Trays Using a Mobile Manipulator

Mobile manipulators are able to operate in a large workspace, and have the potential to replace human workers to perform a sequence of pick-and-place tasks at separate locations. Many existing works optimize the base position or manipulator configuration for a single manipulation task, however, very few of them consider a sequence of tasks. In this paper, we present a planner that plans a minimum sequence of base positions for a mobile manipulator to robustly collect objects stored in multiple trays. We use inverse kinematics to determine the base region where a mobile manipulator can grasp the target objects stored in a tray, and move the mobile manipulator to the intersections of base regions to reduce the operation time for moving the base. We ensure robustness by only considering the intersection whose radius of the inscribed circle is larger than the base positioning error. Then the minimization of the number of base positions is formulated as a 0–1 knapsack problem. Besides, considering different object placements in the tray, we analyze feasible policies for dynamically updating the base sequence based on either the remaining objects or the target objects to be picked. In the experiment, we examine our planner on various scenarios, including different object placements: (1) Regularly placed toy objects; (2) Randomly placed industrial parts; and different implementation policies: (1) Apply globally static base positions; (2) Dynamically update the base positions. The experiment results show that the time for moving the base decreases by 11.22 seconds (29.37%) to 17.26 seconds (36.77%) by reducing one base movement, and demonstrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed method.