ALMA

The motivation behind the development of mobilemanipulation technology is clear: First, augmenting a mobile robot with a manipulator promotes it from being a mere observer of its environment into an actor that is capable of affecting its surroundings; secondly, providing a robotic arm with a mobile base extends its limited workspace to one that is virtually infinite. These two systems could complement one another even more with a legged mobile platform, which offers high payload capacity, increased redundancy allowing for richer motions, and great versatility for traversing unstructured terrain.

Therefore, we equipped our quadrupedal robot ANYmal with a robotic manipulator to generate a system capable of Articulated Locomotion and MAnipulation (ALMA). Initially, ALMA comprised of an ANYmal B robot with Kinova’s Jaco arm, while a more recent version uses the ANYmal C quadruped equipped with a custom-made robotic arm (DynaArm). Both robots are fully torque-controllable thus allowing for highly dynamic maneuvers. Our work focuses on designing holistic planning and control architectures that enable ALMA to perform a variety of whole-body manipulation tasks, such as dynamically lifting heavy objects, or opening resistive doors.

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