Whole-Body Control on Non-holonomic Mobile Manipulation for Grapevine Winter Pruning Automation

TL;DR

This paper presents a whole-body motion control framework for a non-holonomic mobile manipulator designed for grapevine pruning, ensuring task priority coordination for efficient unstructured agricultural tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a task priority-based control method for a non-holonomic mobile manipulator in vineyard pruning, enabling coordinated motion without task interference.

Findings

Successful grapevine spur pruning with the proposed controller

Effective task prioritization in complex manipulation tasks

Enhanced efficiency in unstructured agricultural environments

Abstract

Mobile manipulators that combine mobility and manipulability, are increasingly being used for various unstructured application scenarios in the field, e.g. vineyards. Therefore, the coordinated motion of the mobile base and manipulator is an essential feature of the overall performance. In this paper, we explore a whole-body motion controller of a robot which is composed of a 2-DoFs non-holonomic wheeled mobile base with a 7-DoFs manipulator (non-holonomic wheeled mobile manipulator, NWMM) This robotic platform is designed to efficiently undertake complex grapevine pruning tasks. In the control framework, a task priority coordinated motion of the NWMM is guaranteed. Lower-priority tasks are projected into the null space of the top-priority tasks so that higher-priority tasks are completed without interruption from lower-priority tasks. The proposed controller was evaluated in a grapevine spur pruning experiment scenario.