A Method for Optimizing the Base Position of Mobile Painting Manipulators

摘要

This paper presents an algorithm to optimize the base position of a mobile manipulator to meet the requirements of local painting tasks. Considering the physical limits and singularity of the manipulator, the feasible base positions are first discretely calculated with the given poses of the end effector by inverse kinematics. Then, the joint-level performance criteria are proposed with respect to the requirements of the painting process. The weight coefficients are also determined by the critic method to balance the contribution of every criterion. Thus, the globally near-optimal base position is selected by sorting all feasible positions according to the evaluation criteria. The experimental results show that the planning result is well executed and has an acceptable computation time, thus demonstrating that the algorithm is both practical and effective compared with previous methods. Note to Practitioners-Finding a proper base position is pivotal for achieving automatic offline planning for a manipulator mounted on a mobile platform. We present an algorithm that leads to an appropriate base position for the manipulator by which the manipulator could reach all the target points with specific orientations and keep a stable velocity of the end effector. This will greatly facilitate the offline planning for mobile manipulator systems such as the painting system implemented in this paper. With no need to manually participate in the algorithm implementation, operators can simply import the path-point data and obtain the optimized base position. The experimental results presented in this paper are encouraging in that the velocity of the end effector is more stable and the planning efficiency is highly increased.