A Door Opening Method by a Mobile Manipulator with Passive Joints.

Abstract

This study addresses the problem of opening a door by a manipulator mounted on a mobile robot. Generally speaking, the main subject of opening a door is how to prevent the occurrence of internal forces when the robot moves. Many researchers have been reported to overcome the problem based on the force and/or compliant control. These methods performed well, however, the result of the control system became rather complicated. Additionally, they require force sensors to achieve the control. In contrast, this paper presents a new concept to avoid such complications by making elbow and shoulder joints of the manipulator to be passive. It means no control will be performed on these joints. In doing so, the internal forces between the door and the mobile manipulator will vanish with no efforts. In this paper, first we discuss the differences between the traditional methods and the proposed one to describe the idea. Then the performance of the proposed method is investigated through computer simulations.