Compound manipulation mode for improving task-ability of multi-arm multi-flipper crawler robot

This paper presents a new manipulation mode for multi-arm and multi-flipper robots to improve the manipulation ability of them. Multi-arm and multi-flipper crawler robots designed for disaster response or other uses are naturally divided into two function parts from the design stage. There are the crawlers and the flippers for robot locomotion tasks, and the arms for manipulation tasks. In this design concept, the flippers and arms are hardly to systematically and actively cooperate with each other, and these control systems cannot fully play the structural features of this kind of robot. To solve this problem, we proposed a compound manipulation mode (CMM) for multi-arm multi-flipper robot. In this control mode, the flippers and arms are controlled as a whole in manipulation tasks, the flippers will support the arms to own bigger manipulation space, to have better manipulation posture and to optimize the position of robot center of gravity (COG) to make sure robot in good stable state. Four arm and four flipper robot OCTOPUS was used as the test platform, and the verification experiments were carried out. The results indicated that CMM control mode can achieve all the proposals, therefore the concept of CMM control mode is successful and useful.