Mobile manipulation is a hot topic of research due to the increased flexibility in tasks they offer. However, 'true' mobile manipulation, that is seamless integration and synchronization of mobility and manipulation is rarely performed in a standard industrial or service robotics scenario. Even though, there is huge demand for such applications for example, a mobile robot applying sealant on a large aircraft wing, off the shelf solutions are missing. The reason being, basic challenges like positioning of mobile platform for a task, dealing with redundancies from a planning and control point of view, a repeatable fast inverse kinematics and dealing with high dimensional Configuration space of the highly redundant mobile robot are still not solved. In this paper we present a novel and generalized algorithm to solve inverse kinematics for mobile manipulators in closed form. We also define reusable, generalized redundancy parameters which have meaning in the task space. The algorithm is implemented on the real-time KUKA Sunrise robot controller and Nullspace motions have been performed on our 12 DOF Valeri robot.
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