A Minimum-Energy Control Approach for Redundant Mobile Manipulators in Physical Human-Robot Interaction Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a control method for mobile manipulators in human-robot interaction that minimizes energy use, enhancing safety and efficiency during physical tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel minimum-energy control approach specifically designed for redundant mobile manipulators in physical interaction scenarios.

Findings

Reduces overall kinetic energy in the system

Improves performance over benchmark methods

Validated through peg-in-hole experiments

Abstract

Research on mobile manipulation systems that physically interact with humans has expanded rapidly in recent years, opening the way to tasks which could not be performed using fixed-base manipulators. Within this context, developing suitable control methodologies is essential since mobile manipulators introduce additional degrees of freedom, making the design of control approaches more challenging and more prone to performance optimization. This paper proposes a control approach for a mobile manipulator, composed of a mobile base equipped with a robotic arm mounted on the top, with the objective of minimizing the overall kinetic energy stored in the whole-body mobile manipulator in physical human-robot interaction applications. The approach is experimentally tested with reference to a peg-in-hole task, and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces the overall kinetic energy stored in the whole-body robotic system and improves the system performance compared with the benchmark method.