Design and Control of a Service Robot with Modular Cargo Spaces

In this paper, we present a general purpose mobile manipulation robot mainly designed for autonomous handling of various service tasks in indoor spaces. The suggested robot has a small footprint and omnidirectional mobility to navigate through tight indoor spaces while avoiding obstacles, and is equipped with a dexterous manipulator and modular cargo space which can be used to carry and deploy multiple items at once. The robot is capable of perception, navigation and manipulation using the modular software codebase we have developed for general service robots, and has demonstrated the capability of picking up, storing and deploying of multiple objects autonomously using its modular cargo space.