Mobile Manipulation

Overview

Autonomous Mobile Manipulation could be considered the holy grail of robotics: a successful approach to autonomous mobile manipulation has to integrate virtually every aspect of robotics, including mechanism and sensor design, low-level control, motion planning, machine learning, computer vision, and reasoning. Currently, most of the available robotic applications are either capable of performing a very limited set of skills, or can only operate in relatively structured environment. The task of bringing robots to houses and to our daily life remains a challenge. The commercial potential is promising. Truly autonomous robots could dramatically affect health care and planetary exploration. Moreover, those robots could contribute to logistic and military applications, maintain satellites in orbit, and many other tasks currently performed by humans. Research in AMM is also important in terms of advancing basic science.


Faculty


Graduate Students


References

  • Dov Katz, Emily Horrell, Yuandong Yang, Brendan Burns, Thomas Buckley, Anna Grishkan, Volodymyr Zhylkovskyy, Oliver Brock, and Erik Learned-Miller.
    The UMass mobile manipulator UMan: An experimental platform for autonomous mobile manipulation.
    In Workshop on Manipulation in Human Environments, at Robotics: Science and Systems, 2006.
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