Mobile Manipulator

Overview

A mobile manipulator merges two robots into one platform: an autonomous mobile base that drives itself around a facility, and an articulated arm mounted on top that picks, places, and manipulates objects once it arrives. The combination removes the fixed work envelope of a bolted-down arm, the robot can fetch a part from a rack in one aisle, carry it across the floor, and load it into a machine in another. It is used for machine tending, lab automation, and warehouse pick-and-place where the items and stations are spread out rather than fed to a single station.

How it works

The Mobile Base is a differential-drive chassis: two geared Drive Wheel Module modules provide motive force and steering by turning at different speeds, and four corner casters carry the rest of the weight. Two 360° Safety LiDAR scanners and an IMU feed a SLAM stack that maps the building, localises the robot, and enforces protective stops if a person steps into its path. The whole base is commanded by the Onboard Computer, a GPU-class SoC paired with a real-time safety MCU.

On top sits the Six-Axis Arm, six identical Servo Joint modules separated by cast links. Each joint is a Servo Motor driving a Harmonic Reducer strain-wave gearbox through an encoder, giving the arm 0.05 mm repeatability. The wrist carries a Parallel Gripper, a two-finger electric gripper with force feedback, and the Perception Suite suite of colour cameras plus a Depth Camera stereo module that builds a 3D view for locating objects and guiding the grasp.

Energy comes from a swappable Battery Pack Li-ion pack with its own management board, sized for a full shift. A Controller Cabinet cabinet holds the arm servo drives, the base motor driver, and a redundant safety board that limits arm force and speed whenever a person is nearby. A single Wiring Harness ties the base, arm, sensors, and compute together so the platform behaves as one coordinated machine.