Flexible industrial mobile manipulation: a software perspective

With ongoing research in robotics, some specific architectural approaches of robotic systems earn more and more interest by all kinds of industries. Mobile manipulators – robots consisting of a mobile base and a serial manipulator – provide the ability to make robotic manipulation locationindependent, which will be an essential feature in future production. Such robot platforms offer a high level of flexibility and efficiency of robot applications. Especially under the aspect of modularity, mobile manipulators would provide even more flexibility by offering the possibility to exchange or extend the robot hardware for specific applications. To achieve this, modularity also has to be considered in software. In this paper, we present a software architecture for modular mobile manipulation applications. It provides mechanism for reconfigurability, easy programming, and an easy approach for adding external hardware components. Being targeted at industrial use, the architecture also considers security and software deployment aspects. These considerations will, in combination with all the other aspects, be presented by means of two modular mobile manipulation platforms and a set of representative scenarios.