Image based approach to obstacle avoidance in mobile manipulators

Due to many advantages, the mobile manipulators have been used in many areas. However, it is challenging to operate such system in teleoperation because of the too many controllable degrees for the teleoperator. Additionally, because of the unstructured working environment, it is necessary for the mobile manipulator to posses the ability of solving this problem in real time. The existing methods cannot meet these requirements, so this paper proposes a method based on images for a teleoperated mobile manipulator to take advantage of the redundancy to avoid the obstacles. With this method, the teleoperator can concentrate on the end-effector operation regardless of obstacle avoidance of the the arm links. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are well demonstrated by simulations.