Advances in Manufacturing ›› 2023, Vol. 11 ›› Issue (1): 93-110.doi: 10.1007/s40436-022-00411-3

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Base position planning of mobile manipulators for assembly tasks in construction environments

Dai-Jun Xie1, Ling-Dong Zeng1, Zhen Xu1, Shuai Guo1,2, Guo-Hua Cui3,4, Tao Song1   

  1. 1. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing and Robotics, School of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, People's Republic of China;
    2. National Demonstration Center for Experimental Engineering Training Education, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, People's Republic of China;
    3. School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai, 201620, People's Republic of China;
    4. Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center of Intelligent Manufacturing Robot Technology for Large Components, Shanghai, 201620, People's Republic of China
  • Received:2022-02-12 Revised:2022-04-03 Published:2023-02-16
  • Supported by:
    This research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2019YFB1310003), by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. U1913603 and 61803251), and by Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center of Intelligent Manufacturing Robot Technology for Large Components (Grant No. ZXZ20211101).

Abstract: With good mobility and flexibility, mobile manipulators have shown broad applications in construction scenarios. Base position (BP) planning, which refers to the robot autonomously determining its working station in the environment, is an important technique for mobile manipulators when performing the construction assembly task, especially in a large-scale construction environment. However, the BP planning process is tedious and time-consuming for a human worker to carry out. Thus, to improve the efficiency of construction assembly tasks, a novel BP planning method is proposed in this paper, which can lead to appropriate BPs and minimize the number of BPs at the same time. Firstly, the feasible BP regions are generated based on the grid division and the variable workspace of the mobile manipulator. Then, the positioning uncertainties of the mobile manipulator are considered in calculating the preferred BP areas using clustering. Lastly, a set coverage optimization model is established to obtain the minimum number of BPs using an optimization algorithm according to the greedy principle. The simulated experiment based on a 9-degree of free (DoF) mobile manipulator has been performed. The results illustrated that the time for BP planning was significantly reduced and the number of BPs was reduced by 63.41% compared to existing manual planning, which demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The full text can be downloaded at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40436-022-00411-3

Key words: Base position (BP) planning, Mobile manipulators, Variable workspace, Positioning uncertainties, Construction environments