Designing strategy and implementation of mobile manipulator control system for opening door

Abstract

A goal of this research is to successfully accomplish a long distance navigation task, including "passing through a doorway", by an autonomous robot equipped with a manipulator. In our approach to this problem, we apply the concept of action primitives to the mobile manipulator control system. Action primitives are defined as unit elements of a complex behavior, such as door opening behavior. Basically, the action primitives control a robot according sequences of planned motion primitives. But as an important feature, each action primitive is designed with an error adjustment mechanism to cope with accumulated positioning error of the mobile base. In this paper, we report the design and implementation of action primitives for door opening behavior for our experimental robot, and show experimental results of an autonomous mobile manipulator's "passing through a doorway" using sequences of designed action primitives.