Haptic Control of Mobile Manipulators Interacting with the Environment

In the modern society the haptic control of robotic manipulators plays a central role in many industrial fields because of the improvement of human capabilities and the prevention of many hazards that it can provide. Many different studies are focusing on the improvement of the operator experience, aiming at simplifying the control interface and increasing the level of intuitiveness that the system can provide to a non-trained user. This work focus on the control of mobile manipulator platforms, that are gaining popularity in the industrial world because of their capability to merge the manipulation of the environment with a potentially infinite workspace. In particular three different aspects concerning the haptic shared control of mobile manipulators will be studied. Initially the manipulation of liquid container is analyzed and a new feed-forward filtering technique able to guarantee a slosh free motion without any a priori knowledge of the imposed trajectory is proposed. Then the trajectory planning for a mobile base in an unstructured environment is considered. A new planner based on the properties of B-spline curves is studied and tested for both the haptic and the autonomous case. Eventually the control of a mobile manipulator by means of a single commercial haptic device is addressed. A new mapping technique able to provide an intuitive interface for the control for the human operator is presented. The effectiveness of the proposed works is confirmed viaseveral experimental tests.