Automated planning for mobile manipulators using passive RFID tags

Abstract

Robots are widely used in factories to replace human in tedious or dangerous tasks. The manipulators are very effective in achieving specific and repetitive tasks. However, with the recent progress in robotics, robots need to perform more complex tasks such as part feeding and servicing requiring high level planning to find efficient plans. Mobile Manipulators are ideal for these applications because they have a large workspace. This paper proposes an approach based on a Layered Task Planning for mobile manipulators. It uses information from the passive RFID tags to generate near optimal plans. Passive RFID tags are used in order to achieve full automation. They are a cheap way to encode information on the instances of the environment. The approach is tested in a simulation environment to achieve the task of part feeding in an industrial environment