Safe and Coordinated Hierarchical Receding Horizon Control for Mobile Manipulators

Mobile manipulators, constructed by mobile platforms and manipulators, have become a promising solution to future factories for introducing flexibility to manufacturing. This paper presents a method, hierarchical receding horizon control algorithm (HRHC), to assure safety and achieve higher time and space efficiency in robots surrounded by time-varying environments. HRHC contains an optimization based motion planning module that takes account of both the mobile platform and the manipulator to utilize the kinematic redundancy, and a low-level safety controller to deal with fast changes in the environment. With this method, we verify the performance through experiments. The result shows that space efficiency is increased and the HRHC can guarantee local safety in dynamic environments.