• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.507-514
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• 2022

Mobile manipulators are getting lime light in the field of home automation due to their mobility and manipulation capabilities. In this paper, we developed a small size manipulator system that can be mounted on a mobile robot as a preliminary study to develop a mobile manipulator. The developed manipulator has four degree-of-freedom. At the end-effector of manipulator, there are a camera and a gripper to recognize and manipulate the object. One of four degree-of-freedom is linear motion in vertical direction for better interaction with human hands which are located higher than the mobile manipulator. The developed manipulator was designed to dispose the four actuators close to the base of the manipulator to reduce rotational inertia of the manipulator, which improves stability of manipulation and reduces the risk of rollover. The developed manipulator repeatedly performed a pick and place task and successfully manipulate the object within the workspace of manipulator.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.350-356
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• 2020

Workers have been replaced by mobile manipulators for factory automation in recent years. One of the typical tasks for automation is that a mobile manipulator moves to a target location and picks and places an object on the worktable. However, due to the pose estimation error of the mobile platform, the robot cannot reach the exact target position, which prevents the manipulator from being able to accurately pick and place the object on the worktable. In this study, we developed an automatic alignment system using a low-cost camera mounted on the end-effector of a collaborative robot. Camera calibration and pose estimation methods were also proposed for the automatic alignment system. This algorithm uses a markerboard composed of markers to calibrate the camera and then precisely estimate the camera pose. Experimental results demonstrate that the mobile manipulator can perform successful pick and place tasks on various conditions.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.1395-1401
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• 2005

Mobile manipulator is a robot that has mobility and manipulability with the combination of the task robot and mobile robot. One of the most important feature of the Mobile Manipulator is redundant freedom. Using the redundant freedom, Mobile Manipulator can move various mode, perform dexterous motion. It can have the wider workspace and better performance in avoidance of singularity and obstacle than the fixed base structured robot. Cooperation control using the Mobile Manipulator improves the performance of the robot with redundant freedom in workspace. In this paper, configuration control of the Mobile Manipulator has been studied using Task Segment and TOMM(Task-Oriented Manipulability Measure). For verifying the proposed algorithm, we implemented a mobile manipulator, PURL-II, which is composed of a mobile robot with 3DOF and a task robot with SDOF.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.756-767
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• 2005

This paper presents a decentralized motion control method of welding mobile manipulators which use for welding in many industrial fields. Major requirements of welding robots are accuracy, robust, and reliability so that they can substitute for the welders in hazardous and worse environment. To do this, the manipulator has to take the torch tracking along a welding trajectory with a constant velocity and a constant heading angle, and the mobile-platform has to move to avoid the singularities of the manipulator. In this paper, we develop a kinematic model of the mobile-platform and the manipulator as two separate subsystems. With the idea that the manipulator can avoid the singularities by keeping its initial configuration in the welding process, the redundancy problem of system is solved by introducing the platform mobility to realize this idea. Two controllers for the mobile-platform and the manipulator were designed, respectively, and the relationships between two controllers are the velocities of two subsystems. Control laws are obtained based on the Lyapunov function to ensure the asymptotical stability of the system. The simulation and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.31-38
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• 2024

A mobile manipulator is capable of handling a wide range of workspaces by overcoming the limitations of mobility inherent in existing fixed-base manipulators. To simulate the mobile manipulator, two contact operations should be considered in the physics engines. One of these operations is the grasp stability between the gripper and the object, while the other involves the contact between the wheels of the mobile robot and the ground during driving. However, it is still difficult to choose an appropriate physics engine for simulating these contact operations of the mobile manipulator. In this paper, the performance of physics engines for simulating the mobile manipulator is evaluated. Firstly, the grasp stability of the physics engine is quantitatively evaluated based on the contact force discontinuity. Secondly, when the mobile robot is controlled by open or closed-loop control methods, differences in the path taken by the mobile robot depending on the physics engine are analyzed. To assess the performance of robot simulation, three dynamic simulators-MuJoCo, CoppeliaSim, and IsaacSim-are used along with five physics engines: MuJoCo, Newton, ODE, Bullet, and PhysX.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.217-226
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• 2014

Since the world has changed to a society of 21st century high-tech industries, the modern people have become reluctant to work in a difficult and dirty environment. Therefore, unmanned technologies through robots are being demanded. Now days, effects such as voice, control, obstacle avoidance are being suggested, and especially, voice recognition technique that enables convenient interaction between human and machines is very important. In this study, in order to conduct study on the stable motion control of the robot system that has mobile-manipulator structure and is voice command-based, kinetic interpretation and dynamic modeling of two-armed manipulator and three-wheel mobile robot were conducted. In addition, autonomous driving of three-wheel mobile robot and motion control system of two-armed manipulator were designed, and combined robot control through voice command was conducted. For the performance experiment method, driving control and simulation mock experiment of manipulator that has two-armed structure was conducted, and for experiment of combined robot motion control which is voice command-based, through driving control, motion control of two-armed manipulator, and combined control based on voice command, experiment on stable motion control of voice command-based robot system that has mobile-manipulator structure was verified.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2004.08a
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• pp.834-839
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• 2004

In this paper, we investigate the optimal base position and joint configuration of a planar wheeled mobile manipulator in terms of manipulability measure. Taking into account the level of coordination between a manipulator and a platform, both local and global optimization problems are considered. First, based on the kinematic models of a mobile manipulator, the manipulability measures are expressed along with the analysis of the configurational dependency. Second, the geometric symmetry of a mobile manipulator in view of manipulability measure is analyzed, and for some base positions, the best and worst joint configurations are determined, Third, with reverence to the maximum, minimum, and average manipulability measures, the optimal base positions are determined, and the percent improvements due to the base relocation are discussed considering the relative scales among the platform size, the wheel radius, and the link length.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.32-39
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• 2022

Since the mobile platform and the manipulator mounted on it move at the same time in a mobile manipulator, the risk of mutual collision increases. Most of the studies on collision avoidance of mobile manipulators cannot be applied to differential drive type mobile platforms or the end-effector tends to deviate from the desired trajectory for collision avoidance. In this study, a collision avoidance algorithm based on null space projection (CANS) that solves these two problems is proposed. To this end, a modified repulsive force that overcomes the non-holonomic constraints of a mobile platform is generated by adding a virtual repulsive force in the direction of its instantaneous velocity. And by converting this repulsive force into a repulsive velocity and applying it to the null space, the end-effector of the robot avoids a collision while moving along its original trajectory. The proposed CANS algorithm showed excellent performance through self-collision avoidance tests and door opening tests.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.206-212
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• 2009

This paper presents an optimized integrated task planning and control approach for manipulating a nonholonomic robot by mobile manipulators. Then, we derive a kinematics model and a mobility of the mobile manipulator(M2) platform considering it as the combined system of the manipulator and the mobile robot. to improve task execution efficiency utilizing the redundancy, optimal trajectory of the mobile manipulator(M2) platform are maintained while it is moving to a new task point. A cost function for optimality can be defined as a combination of the square errors of the desired and actual configurations of the mobile robot and of the task robot. In the combination of the two square errors, a newly defined mobility of a mobile robot is utilized as a weighting index. With the aid of the gradient method, the cost function is minimized, so the path trajectory that the M2 platform generates is optimized. The simulation results of the 2 ink planar nonholonomic M2 platform are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.758-765
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• 2015

This paper proposes an attitude control system to keep the balance for a two-wheeled mobile manipulator which consists of a mobile platform and a three D.O.F. manipulator. In the conventional control scheme, complicated dynamics of the manipulator need to be derived for balancing control of a mobile manipulator. The method proposed in this paper, however, three links are considered as one body of mass and the dynamics are derived easily by using an inverted pendulum model. One of the best advantage of a sliding mode controller is low sensitivity to plant parameter variations and disturbances, which eliminates the necessity of exact modeling to control the system. Therefore the sliding mode control algorithm has been adopted in this research for the attitude control of mobile platform along the pitch axis. The center of gravity for the whole mobile manipulator is changing depending on the motion of the manipulator. And the orientation variation of center of gravity is used as reference input for the sliding mode controller of the pitch axis to maintain the center of gravity in the middle of robot to keep the balance for the robot. To confirm the performance of controller, MATLAB Simulink has been used and the resulting algorithms are applied to a real robot to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed attitude control.