Cooperative Motion Planning for Mobile Humanoid Robots Based on the Manipulability Map

With the integration of mobility and manipulation, mobile humanoid robot constructed by mobile platform and manipulator has become a potential solution for the industrial manufacturing and services. The strong coupling between the mobile platform and the manipulator generates a high degree of kinematic redundancy. In order to rationally allocate the motion of the mobile platform and the manipulator, a new cooperative motion planning method is proposed. The Manipulability Map (MM) that gives the distribution of the manipulability in cartesian space is first built. Then under the guidance of the MM, the mobile robot path is generated using graph search method. Meanwhile, the minimum jerk model is utilized to generate the manipulator trajectory. Moreover, a task-priority coordinated motion controller is developed to control the trajectory tracking of the mobile robot and the manipulator. In this controller, the trajectory of the manipulator is treated as the primary task and the trajectory of the mobile robot is used as the constraint task. Simulation results demonstrate that the trajectory of the mobile humanoid robot can be found and the robot can achieve high manipulability.