Dual-Arm Mobile Manipulation Planning of a Long Deformable Object in Industrial Installation

In this letter, we present a planning method considering regrasp and mobility for the manipulation problem of a long deformable object in an industrial scenario. The object is carried through designated rollers by a dual-arm robot in the presence of environmental constraints. The problem is formulated by modeling the deformable object as a set of line segments and categorizing obstacles into different types. A hierarchical 2.5D manipulation planner is proposed, which first plans the ideal path of a deformable object in a 2D plane and obtains its topological representation. Next, dual-arm regrasps are determined by utilizing the deformation models, and collision-free paths are planned to meet topological constraints for the grippers. The feasibility of the proposed method is experimentally validated using a humanoid robot, by integrating the planner with a loco-manipulation planning framework and QP-based whole-body motion controller.