Motion Planning for Mobile Manipulators Navigating Doorways via Model Predictive Control

Abstract:Navigating doorways is a fundamental capability for mobile manipulators operating in human environments, requiring coordinated motion between the mobile base and manipulator arm. This paper presents a motion planning framework that generates dynamically feasible and collision-free trajectories for autonomously opening and traversing both push and pull doors. The proposed method formulates the robot and door as a coupled dynamical system within a nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC) optimization framework. Manipulation feasibility is enforced through a penalty-based constraint, avoiding explicit arm kinematic modeling in the planner. Simulations and a hardware experiment demonstrate that the approach successfully plans feasible trajectories for door traversal.

Robotics (cs.RO); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2608.00206 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.00206v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.00206 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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