Consolidating Kinematic Models to Promote Coordinated Mobile Manipulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Virtual Kinematic Chain framework that consolidates mobile base, arm, and object kinematics, enabling more coordinated and efficient mobile manipulation tasks in complex environments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel VKC-based approach that unifies kinematic modeling for mobile manipulation, improving coordination and task success without explicit intermediate goals.

Findings

VKC-based planning outperforms baselines in success rates.

VKC approach produces more efficient trajectories.

Enables complex multi-step tasks in household environments.

Abstract

We construct a Virtual Kinematic Chain (VKC) that readily consolidates the kinematics of the mobile base, the arm, and the object to be manipulated in mobile manipulations. Accordingly, a mobile manipulation task is represented by altering the state of the constructed VKC, which can be converted to a motion planning problem, formulated, and solved by trajectory optimization. This new VKC perspective of mobile manipulation allows a service robot to (i) produce well-coordinated motions, suitable for complex household environments, and (ii) perform intricate multi-step tasks while interacting with multiple objects without an explicit definition of intermediate goals. In simulated experiments, we validate these advantages by comparing the VKC-based approach with baselines that solely optimize individual components. The results manifest that VKC-based joint modeling and planning promote task success rates and produce more efficient trajectories.