Path planning of mobile manipulator for navigation and object clean-up

Abstract

Industry and warehouses have been paying lots of attention to mobile manipulator-based path planner problems. This paper focuses on multi-target object clean-up operations using vision sensor which has ample industrial applications. In this work a vision-based path planning approach has been implemented using A* algorithm in order to avoid the obstacles and reach the goal location using the shortest path. The algorithm was developed to classify objects in the workspace as handleable/non-handleable from real-time measurements. In case of multi-object clean-up operations, a priority is set depending on the scenario and a weighted cost function approach is proposed. A series of simulation experiments are conducted to test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The entire workflow of the mobile manipulation-based path planner is demonstrated using various scenarios. This problem has lot of relevance in real world.