Exploring Mobile Manipulation: Bringing Arms to Task
Revolutionize Your Operations with Mobile Manipulation
In today’s fast-paced world where milliseconds matter, you can’t wait for your conveyor belts to bring tasks to robots. You need to bring your robots to the task! While many manipulation tasks today are well handled using a fixed work cell, many as yet unserviced applications cannot have infrastructure built around them. You cannot build a work cell inside your delivery truck and you can’t build a conveyor belt under your strawberries. You might say that these environments are…unstructured. Fortunately, MoveIt Pro can help!
What is Mobile Manipulation?
Mobile manipulation combines robotic arms with mobile bases. This enables the manipulator to traverse outside the standard workspace and cross the warehouse to attend to the task “at hand.” Commonly, this would involve mounting a high degree of freedom manipulator to an autonomous mobile robot (AMR), often with a suite of tools for the arm to use at the task point. Conversely, customers have added both multiple robot arms to a base to increase pick efficiency or foregone the AMR and mounted a gripper to a drone for tasks where a wheeled robot is infeasible for the task. Enabling robots to move freely and interact dynamically with their surroundings empowers robots to perform complex tasks that require both mobility and precise manipulation. In an increasingly automated future, robotic platforms will have to adapt to various environments and tasks. This, of course, requires capable software…
Why Mobile Manipulation Matters
The integration of mobile manipulation into your operation unlocks new levels of efficiency and flexibility. Here’s how different industries are benefiting from this technology:
Warehouse Automation
Mobile manipulators can autonomously navigate warehouses, pick and transport items, and handle inventory with precision. This reduces labor costs, increases throughput, and improves overall efficiency.
Healthcare
In hospitals, mobile manipulators can assist with delivering medications, moving supplies, and aiding in patient care. Their ability to navigate hospital corridors and perform delicate tasks enhances patient care and operational efficiency.
Agriculture
Mobile robots in agriculture can harvest crops, plant seeds, and monitor plant health. Their mobility allows them to cover large fields and adapt to changing conditions, while their arms handle intricate tasks such as sorting produce.
Cleanrooms & Laboratories
Automation excels at handling hazardous or sensitive materials in controlled environments. Adding mobile manipulation into this toolkit expands the range of possible applications.
Construction & Maintenance
Mobile manipulators excel in construction and maintenance roles. They navigate complex environments to perform assembly and repair tasks, reducing downtime and enhancing safety.
MoveIt Pro: Leading the Way in Mobile Manipulation
MoveIt Pro is at the forefront of the mobile manipulation revolution, offering an industry-leading runtime and developer platform designed for robots that move. With MoveIt Pro, your engineering team can deploy dynamic robots that are not confined to the work cell.
Here’s what makes MoveIt Pro the top choice for advanced mobile manipulation:
Whole Body Planning: Coordinate the movement of the mobile base and multiple robotic arms simultaneously, achieving maximum dexterity. Perfect for complex tasks that are beyond the scope of a normal workspace but are not so distant that moving the mobile base alone is appropriate. Think spraying or scanning tasks. MoveIt Pro includes full-body planners for both joint space and cartesian space, increasing flexibility in behavior design.
Base Navigation + Manipulation: Seamlessly plan and execute base navigation separately from the robot arm. This allows robots to traverse large environments (such as a warehouse floor or the lunar surface) while avoiding obstacles and executing the manipulation task at the destination. This might look like bin picking and delivery or valve operation.
Behavior Trees: Combine the two capabilities as the situation requires using our built-in behavior tree editor and execution runtime. Imagine cleaning tasks where you have to move from room to room, but then pick up a tool and spray a large area when you arrive.
Perception: Combine a range of sensors, including lidars and rgb/depth cameras. MoveIt Pro builds and maintains an environmental understanding by fusing all of these in a single picture of the world. But sensing is just half the battle. Intelligently making use of that data through MoveIt Pro’s integrated perception systems enables dynamic obstacle detection and avoidance, finding and segmenting grasp targets, and robot localization.
Realtime Control: MoveIt Pro’s optimized and safety-certifiable motion controllers ensure that robotic arms maintain accuracy and stability, even during complex tasks. Built on top of a real-time control architecture, they allow direct hardware control and streaming capabilities, enabling visual servoing and force based control.
Transform Your Operations Today
Mobile manipulation is set to revolutionize how industries operate, offering new levels of efficiency, flexibility, and precision. Whether you’re looking to enhance warehouse operations, improve healthcare delivery, advance agricultural practices, or streamline construction and maintenance tasks, mobile manipulators are the key to unlocking the future of automation.
