Mobile Manipulation Platform for Autonomous Indoor Inspections in Low-Clearance Areas

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel mobile manipulation platform combining a small-footprint ground vehicle and a long-reach robotic arm, optimized for stable indoor inspection in low-clearance environments, with extensive testing demonstrating its capabilities.

Contribution

The integration of Jackal and Kinova Gen3 with hardware and software modifications creates a stable, high-performance mobile manipulation system for indoor inspections, overcoming size and stability limitations.

Findings

Successful semi-autonomous navigation to waypoints in busy indoor environments.

High-precision self-alignment with planar structures for intervention tasks.

Maintained individual robot capabilities within the integrated platform.

Abstract

Mobile manipulators have been used for inspection, maintenance and repair tasks over the years, but there are some key limitations. Stability concerns typically require mobile platforms to be large in order to handle far-reaching manipulators, or for the manipulators to have drastically reduced workspaces to fit onto smaller mobile platforms. Therefore we propose a combination of two widely-used robots, the Clearpath Jackal unmanned ground vehicle and the Kinova Gen3 six degree-of-freedom manipulator. The Jackal has a small footprint and works well in low-clearance indoor environments. Extensive testing of localization, navigation and mapping using LiDAR sensors makes the Jackal a well developed mobile platform suitable for mobile manipulation. The Gen3 has a long reach with reasonable power consumption for manipulation tasks. A wrist camera for RGB-D sensing and a customizable end effector interface makes the Gen3 suitable for a myriad of manipulation tasks. Typically these features would result in an unstable platform, however with a few minor hardware and software modifications, we have produced a stable, high-performance mobile manipulation platform with significant mobility, reach, sensing, and maneuverability for indoor inspection tasks, without degradation of the component robots' individual capabilities. These assertions were investigated with hardware via semi-autonomous navigation to waypoints in a busy indoor environment, and high-precision self-alignment alongside planar structures for intervention tasks.