A Method for Optimizing the Base Position of Mobile Painting Manipulators.

This paper presents an algorithm to optimize the base position of a mobile manipulator to meet the requirements of local painting tasks. Considering the physical limits and singularity of the manipulator, the feasible base positions are first discretely calculated with the given poses of the end effector by inverse kinematics. Then, the joint-level performance criteria are proposed with respect to the requirements of the painting process. The weight coefficients are also determined by the critic method to balance the contribution of every criterion. Thus, the globally near-optimal base position is selected by sorting all feasible positions according to the evaluation criteria. The experimental results show that the planning result is well executed and has an acceptable computation time, thus demonstrating that the algorithm is both practical and effective compared with previous methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]