AILA - design of an autonomous mobile dual-arm robot

This paper presents the design of the robot AILA, a mobile dual-arm robot system developed as a research platform for investigating aspects of the currently booming multidisciplinary area of mobile manipulation. The robot integrates and allows in a single platform to perform research in most of the areas involved in autonomous robotics: navigation, mobile and dual-arm manipulation planning, active compliance and force control strategies, object recognition, scene representation, and semantic perception. AILA has 32 degrees of freedom, including 7-DOF arms, 4-DOF torso, 2-DOF head, and a mobile base equipped with six wheels, each of them with two degrees of freedom. The primary design goal was to achieve a lightweight arm construction with a payload-to-weight ratio greater than one. Besides, an adjustable body should sustain the dual-arm system providing an extended workspace. In addition, mobility is provided by means of a wheel-based mobile base. As a result, AILA's arms can lift 8kg and weigh 5.5kg, thus achieving a payload-to-weight ratio of 1.45. The paper will provide an overview of the design, especially in the mechatronics area, as well as of its realization, the sensors incorporated in the system, and its control software.

[1]  Frank Kirchner,et al.  Development of an Intelligent Joint Actuator Prototype for Climbing and Walking Robots , 2009 .

[2]  Steven M. LaValle,et al.  RRT-connect: An efficient approach to single-query path planning , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[3]  Alin Albu-Schäffer,et al.  DLR's torque-controlled light weight robot III-are we reaching the technological limits now? , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[4]  T. Rabbani,et al.  SEGMENTATION OF POINT CLOUDS USING SMOOTHNESS CONSTRAINT , 2006 .

[5]  Oliver Brock,et al.  The UMass Mobile Manipulator UMan: An Experimental Platform for Autonomous Mobile Manipulation , 2006 .

[6]  George Vosselman,et al.  Segmentation of point clouds using smoothness constraints , 2006 .

[7]  Nils J. Nilsson,et al.  APPLICATION OF INTELLIGENT AUTOMATA TO RECONNAISSANCE. , 1967 .

[8]  Florian Schmidt,et al.  Rollin' Justin - Design considerations and realization of a mobile platform for a humanoid upper body , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[9]  Christoph Borst,et al.  A Humanoid Two-Arm System for Dexterous Manipulation , 2006, 2006 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots.

[10]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[11]  Maxim Likhachev,et al.  Planning for autonomous door opening with a mobile manipulator , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[12]  James J. Kuffner,et al.  OpenRAVE: A Planning Architecture for Autonomous Robotics , 2008 .

[13]  Geoffrey A. Hollinger,et al.  HERB: a home exploring robotic butler , 2010, Auton. Robots.

[14]  Shen Wei.  BUILDING BOUNDARY EXTRACTION BASED ON LIDAR POINT CLOUDS DATA , 2008 .

[15]  Oliver Brock,et al.  NSF/NASA Workshop on Autonomous Mobile Manipulation (AMM) , 2005 .

[16]  Frank Kirchner,et al.  3D SCENE RECOVERY AND SPATIAL SCENE ANALYSIS FOR UNORGANIZED POINT CLOUDS , 2010 .

[17]  David G. Lowe,et al.  Object recognition from local scale-invariant features , 1999, Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision.

[18]  Frank Kirchner,et al.  SpaceClimber: Development of a Six-Legged Climbing Robot for Space Exploration , 2010, ISR/ROBOTIK.