Design of a Reconfigurable Mobile Collaborative Manipulator for Industrial Applications

This paper addresses the design of a reconfigurable mobile manipulator consisting of a mobile base and a collaborative serial robot. The robotic system is meant to work in an industrial environment and perform different logistic tasks. Unlike commercial solutions, the mobile base and the anthropomorphic arm are free to decouple and work separately as two different entities, thus optimizing working times and maximizing the hardware utilization ratio. The proposed mobile manipulator is equipped with an automatic braking system to ensure safety and stability during manipulation, a lifting system that allows the robotic arm to work at different heights, and a spatial referencing process to compensate for positioning error of the mobile base. An illustrative working cycle is implemented in an industrially relevant environment to test all features and show potentialities, in terms of flexibility and reconfigurability, of the presented solution.