Door-opening behavior of an autonomous mobile manipulator by sequence of action primitives

A goal of this research is to accomplish a long distance navigation task by an autonomous mobile manipulator, including a behavior of "Passing through a doorway." In our approach to this problem, we apply the concept of action primitives to the mobile manipulator control system. Action primitives are defined as unit elements of a complex behavior (such as door opening behavior), which control a robot according to a sequence of planned motion primitives. An important feature of the concept is that each action primitive is designed to include an error adjustment mechanism to cope with the accumulated position error of the mobile base. In this article, we report on the design and implementation of action primitives for a door opening task, and show experimental results for "Passing through a doorway" by an autonomous mobile manipulator using sequences of action primitives.