Whole-Body Control of a Mobile Manipulator for Passive Collaborative Transportation

TL;DR

This paper presents a control architecture for mobile manipulators that enables safe and stable physical human-robot collaboration during transportation tasks, using passivity techniques for adaptive interaction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel whole-body control framework that ensures robust stability and adaptive interaction in human-robot collaborative transportation.

Findings

The control architecture maintains stability during physical interaction.

Experimental validation demonstrates effective collaborative transportation.

The system adapts interaction parameters online for improved performance.

Abstract

Human-robot collaborative tasks foresee interactions between humans and robots with various degrees of complexity. Specifically, for tasks which involve physical contact among the agents, challenges arise in the modelling and control of such interaction. In this paper we propose a control architecture capable of ensuring a flexible and robustly stable physical human-robot interaction, focusing on a collaborative transportation task. The architecture is deployed onto a mobile manipulator, modelled as a whole-body structure, which aids the operator during the transportation of an unwieldy load. Thanks to passivity techniques, the controller adapts its interaction parameters online while preserving robust stability for the overall system, thus experimentally validating the architecture.