Planning and control of self-calibrated manipulation for a robot on a mobile platform

The essence of our scheme is to extend our earlier (Ghosh et al., 1996) proposed multi-sensor based observation scheme to a situation where the location of the mobile platform is unknown. A new self-calibrated manipulation scheme is proposed to determine the position and orientation of the part with respect to the coordinate system attached to the base of the robot manipulator. The novelties of the proposed approach can be summarized as (i) multi-sensor fusion scheme based on complementary data for the purpose of part localization, (ii) part tracking and grasping control based on parallel tracking, and (iii) self-calibration of the location of the mobile platform using visual data and feature points on the end-effector. The principle advantages of the proposed scheme are described as follows. (i) It renders possible reconfiguring a manufacturing workcell without recalibrating the robot based coordinate frame. This significantly reduces the setup time of the workcell. (ii) It significantly reduces the requirement on the image processing speed. Experimental study of the proposed scheme has been carried out and the results are reported in this paper.