Motion design for service robots

Abstract

This paper considers the motion design problem for a service robot which is moving and manipulating objects in a partly known indoor environment such as stores and libraries. A service robot is requested to serve a set of work-stations in the environment providing transport and delivery tasks. The objective is to determine the optimum sequence of the work-stations visited by the service robot exactly once assuring that the robot's path through the work-station is collision free. In addition, a time optimal algorithm is presented for motion planning of the manipulator for pick and place objects at the work-stations. Simulation examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.