Mobile Robot Manipulation System with a Reconfigurable Robotic Arm: Design and Experiment * Working in unknown environment has become a fundamental requirement of mobile robot manipulation system. This application scenarios require robots to have some basic capabilities, such as the fast and flexible locomotion, dexterous manipulation, and environmental interaction. However, most studies have only focus on just one of the aspects, which restricts the actual applications. This paper attempts to show a novel design of the mobile robot manipulation system with all above capabilities. The system consists of a mobile platform and a reconfigurable 7 degrees of freedom (DOF) robotic arm. The quadruped and wheeled locomotion is realized on the mobile platform. Different from traditional mobile robot manipulation system, a new type of reconfigurable connecting mechanism (RCM) is developed to realize the quick change the configurations and modules. Due to these designs, the system can adapt for different tasks. Besides, the hardware and software of the control system are introduced. Finally, the performances of the developed mobile robot manipulation system are validated by a series of experiments.

A Hybrid Navigation and Image Processing Model with Dynamic Mobile Manipulation A mobile manipulator is widely used for many scenarios such as warehouse management, and disaster rescue missions. The autonomy of robots operating in an unknown environment is critical. In this paper, a dynamic mobile manipulation robot platform based on the Pioneer 3AT robot, equipped with one 6DOF manipulator and multiple sensors is designed and tested. This autonomous mobile manipulator robot platform functions with mapping, pathplanning, obstacle avoidance, image processing, colorbased object detecting and manipulation algorithms running in the MatlabROS environment. In addition, Arduinobased devices are used to enable manipulation control and other future addon devices. The platform is operating in an unknown dynamic environment using a local path planning algorithm for map exploration, colorbased object detection, and manipulation tasks. The project aims to build a platform that is universally suitable for various task situations, as well as easy and efficient to modify and test algorithms with the advantage of data processing capability provided by Matlab. The modification for integrating Pioneer 3AT robot and Trossen Widow X robotics arm is introduced on both hardware and software levels.