Integrating Maneuverable Planning and Adaptive Control for Robot Cart-Pushing under Disturbances

--Precise and flexible cart-pushing is a challenging task for mobile robots. The motion constraints during cart-pushing and the robot's redundancy lead to complex motion planning problems, while variable payloads and disturbances present complicated dynamics. In this work, we propose a novel planning and control framework for flexible whole-body coordination and robust adaptive control. Our motion planning method employs a local coordinate representation and a novel kinematic model to solve a nonlinear optimization problem, thereby enhancing motion maneuverability by generating feasible and flexible push poses. Furthermore, we present a disturbance rejection control method to resist disturbances and reduce control errors for the complex control problem without requiring an accurate dynamic model. T o the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically evaluate the flexibility and robustness of cart-pushing methods in experiments. The video supplement is available at https://sites.google.com/view/mpac-pushing/. Index T erms--Cart-pushing, mobile manipulation, whole-body control, adaptive control ANIPULA TION of cart-like objects is common in daily life, such as in cargo transportation, shopping assistance and luggage handling at airports. Recent studies [1]-[6] have explored using mobile robots to replace humans in these tasks. Most of these works simplify local planning and control by employing simple manipulators (e.g., single-link structures) or by limiting the robot's Degrees of Freedom (DoFs).