Keep It Upright: Model Predictive Control for Nonprehensile Object Transportation With Obstacle Avoidance on a Mobile Manipulator

We consider a nonprehensile manipulation task in which a mobile manipulator must balance objects on its end effector without grasping them—known as the
waiter's problem
—and move to a desired location while avoiding static and dynamic obstacles. In contrast to existing approaches, our focus is on fast online planning in response to new and changing environments. Our main contribution is a whole-body constrained model predictive controller (MPC) for a mobile manipulator that balances objects and avoids collisions. Furthermore, we propose planning using the minimum statically-feasible friction coefficients, which provides robustness to frictional uncertainty and other force disturbances while also substantially reducing the compute time required to update the MPC policy. Simulations and hardware experiments on a velocity-controlled mobile manipulator with up to seven balanced objects, stacked objects, and various obstacles show that our approach can handle a variety of conditions that have not been previously demonstrated, with end effector speeds and accelerations up to 2.0 m/s and 7.9 m/s
²
, respectively. Notably, we demonstrate a projectile avoidance task in which the robot avoids a thrown ball while balancing a tall bottle.