###### Abstract  
This paper presents a mobile manipulation platform designed for autonomous depalletizing tasks. The proposed solution integrates machine vision, control and mechanical components to increase flexibility and ease of deployment in industrial environments such as warehouses. A collaborative robot mounted on a mobile base is proposed, equipped with a simple manipulation tool and a 3D in-hand vision system that detects parcel boxes on a pallet, and that pulls them one by one on the mobile base for transportation. The robot setup allows to avoid the cumbersome implementation of pick-and-place operations, since it does not require lifting the boxes. The 3D vision system is used to provide an initial estimation of the pose of the boxes on the top layer of the pallet, and to accurately detect the separation between the boxes for manipulation. Force measurement provided by the robot together with admittance control are exploited to verify the correct execution of the manipulation task. The proposed system was implemented and tested in a simplified laboratory scenario and the results of experimental trials are reported.  
mobile manipulation; robot vision; industrial depalletizing +
Footnote †: journal: Medical  
Robot end-effectors are usually designed to pick up an entire layer of boxes from the origin pallet and place it on a distribution and serialization system composed of multiple conveyor belts, even in the case of light boxes or when only a few boxes are needed to be transferred from the origin pallet. Moreover, since more than ten thousand different types of goods may need to be stored in a single food and beverage factory, warehouses require large buildings for intermediate buffers to temporarily store the depalletized items before moving them to the destination (mixed) pallets.  
In this paper, we address the automated depalletizing problem by defining a new system able to integrate safety, maneuverability and ease of interaction for a palletizing/depalletizing task performed in an industrial environment. This system could be considered a first prototype of a multi-purpose platform with high reconfiguration capabilities for the interaction and assistance of human operators in a shared warehouse environment. To this end, our system exploits a serial collaborative robot (cobot) mounted on an autonomous mobile robot (AMR). Both the serial arm and the AMR must be endowed with collaborative features, since the overall robotic system must be able to safely operate in an industrial environment shared with humans. The cobot is equipped with an eye-in-hand time of flight (ToF) 3D camera. The cobot, an UR10e from Universal Robots, has six DOFs, providing a wide workspace for box extraction, 10 Kg payload, and wrist force/torque sensor for tool wrench measurement. A shovel-shaped tool mounted on the cobot end-effector is used to fit in the gap between boxes and to pull the cardboard boxes one by one on the mobile base for transportation. The choice of this type of tool with respect to other standard solutions allows to reduce both the total execution time and the load on the manipulator. The 3D camera is located on the cobot end-effector to detect the pose of the boxes and the separation gap between them for tool insertion.  
The design of the proposed mobile manipulation system was driven by the fact that payload is one of the main bottleneck problems faced by collaborative mobile robots in industrial environments. Indeed, due to safety and maneuverability, only small cobots can be placed on AMRs. Therefore, the proposed solution is based on decoupling object displacement and lifting operations, leaving the former to the cobot and the latter to an automatic lifting device located on the AMR, next to the cobot. The cobot manipulates the item at hand (e.g., a box) without lifting it, but rather by dragging it onto the lifting device.