Mobile Manipulation-Based Path Planner for Object Clean-up Operations

Mobile manipulation systems have been used in several industrial operations, one of these being object cleanup. The objective of this paper is to devise a mobile manipulation-based path planner which uses a weighted cost approach to generate priorities and utilizes the A* algorithm to generate the optimal path for multi-object clean-up operations. The paper also focuses on combining vision-based navigation approaches with the notion of modeling of obstacles and classifying them as per their type, pose and spatial measurements. The mobile manipulation-based path planner has been tested under different weights and scenarios to simulate the object clean-up task. The performance of proposed algorithm is evaluated using criteria like the total number of nodes explored and total path cost for all the cycles.