Multisensor-Based Autonomous Grasp Planning for Mobile Manipulator Navigation System with a Novel Soft Gripper

Mobile manipulators are widely used in different fields for transferring and grasping tasks such as in medical assisting devices, industrial production, and hotel services. It is challenging to improve navigation accuracies and grasping success rates in complex environments. In this paper, we develop a multisensor-based mobile grasping system which is configured with a vision system and a novel gripper set in an UR5 manipulator. Additionally, an error term of a cost function based on DWA (dynamic window approach) is proposed to improve the navigation performance of the mobile platform through visual guidance. In the process of mobile grasping, the size and position of the object can be identified by a visual recognition algorithm, and then the finger space and chassis position can be automatically adjusted; thus, the object can be grasped by the UR5 manipulator and gripper. To demonstrate the proposed methods, comparison experiments are also conducted using our developed mobile grasping system. According to the analysis of the experimental results, the motion accuracy of the mobile chassis has been improved significantly, satisfying the requirements of navigation and grasping success rates, as well as achieving a high performance over a wide grasping size range from 1.7 mm to 200 mm.