Stabilization and control on a pipe-rack of a wheeled mobile manipulator with a snake-like arm

Autonomous inspection and maintenance tasks with robots in oil and gas refineries require moving along pipelines and manipulation dexterity in cluttered environments. This paper investigates the problem of controlling a wheeled mobile manipulator endowed with a snake-like arm to inspect the structures while stabilizing the supporting pipe. A model predictive control approach stabilizes the wheeled robot on the pipe. When the wheel torques saturate, the stabilization task leverages the resulting propagating force on the wheeled robot given by the snake-like arm’s dynamics. The significant number of degrees of freedom given by the snake-like arm allows a prioritized redundancy resolution scheme with hybrid motion/force tracking to inspect the same and adjacent pipes while avoiding self-collisions and environmental impacts. Simulations in the realistic Gazebo environment validate the achieved preliminary results. •Pipe inspection requires moving along pipelines and dexterity in cluttered environments.•Novel over-actuated hybrid platform to inspect the structures while stabilizing on the pipe.•Exploiting the arm dynamic in an optimization algorithm for the stabilization task.•Development of a parallel motion-interaction control with redundancy resolution.