Optimized Mobile Robot Positioning for better Utilization of the Workspace of an attached Manipulator

For mobile manipulation robots, the selection of a suitable base position is important to perform a given task. It guarantees that the manipulation points are reachable and that the number of base positions can be minimized. In this work, a geometrical motivated representation of the workspace is introduced. Therefore, the workspace is split into several tori. For this efficient torus-based workspace representation it can be checked if a given target position is within the workspace. In addition, based upon this representation an optimization problem is formulated, that is capable to find optimal base positions for reaching three-dimensional target points. Its applicability to a list of target points of a real-world inspection task scenario is shown. This can be used to reduce the number of repositioning during the task.