Manipulability-Aware Shared Locomanipulation Motion Generation for Teleoperation of Mobile Manipulators

Abstract
The teleoperation of mobile manipulators may pose significant challenges, demanding complex interfaces and causing a substantial burden to the human operator due to the need to switch continuously from the manipulation of the arm to the control of the mobile platform. Hence, several works have considered to exploit shared control techniques to overcome this issue and, in general, to facilitate the task execution.

This work proposes a manipulability-aware shared locomanipulation motion generation method to facilitate the execution of telemanipulation tasks with mobile manipulators. The method uses the manipulability level of the end-effector to control the generation of the mobile base and manipulator motions, facilitating their simultaneous control by the operator while executing telemanipulation tasks. Therefore, the operator can exclusively control the end-effector, while the underlying architecture generates the mobile platform commands depending on the end-effector manipulability level. 

The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated with a number of experiments in which the CENTAURO robot, a hybrid leg-wheel platform with an anthropomorphic upper body, is teleoperated to execute a set of telemanipulation tasks.