Decoupled motion planning of a mobile manipulator for precision agriculture

Abstract Thanks to recent developments in service robotics technologies, precision agriculture (PA) is becoming an increasingly prominent research field, and several studies were made to present and outline how the use of mobile robotic systems can help and improve farm production. In this paper, the integration of a custom-designed mobile base with a commercial robotic arm is presented, showing the functionality and features of the overall system for crop monitoring and sampling. To this aim, the motion planning problem is addressed, developing a tailored algorithm based on the so-called manipulability index, that treats the base and robotic arm mobility as two independent degrees of motion; also developing an open source closed-form inverse kinematics algorithm for the kinematically redundant manipulator. The presented methods and sub-system, even though strictly related to a specific mobile manipulator system, can be adapted not only to PA applications where a mobile manipulator is involved but also to the wider field of assistive robotics.