Mobile Manipulation in Service Robotics: Scene and Object Recognition with Manipulator-Mounted Laser Ranger

In this paper, we present a method for safely manipulating simple everyday objects. The manipulation task is done in a daily environment rather than an artificial structured lab environment. The key feature of our method is the laser ranger mounted onto the manipulator. This approach gives the flexibility which is needed to interact in human environments. It also enables us to create a 3d point cloud of the environment. This point cloud is then segmented by the object recognition to find potential objects. The collision-free movement of the manipulator is calculated out of the objects which are provided by the object recognition. The robustness of our approach is demonstrated by an everyday scenario.