Visual Predictive Control for mobile manipulator: Visibility, manipulability, and stability

This paper proposes a visual predictive control solution adapted to mobile manipulators and able to cope with several issues related to visibility, manipulability, and stability. To address these problems, the proposed strategy relies on (i) the use of two complementary cameras, (ii) the definition of a cost function depending on both the vision-based task and the manipulability, (iii) the integration of time-varying constraints allowing to prioritize the former against the latter. The strategy has been analyzed through simulation using ROS and Gazebo and implemented on our TIAGo robot. The obtained results fully validate the proposed approach.