MoMa-CoDesign optimizes the arm mounting parameters of modular mobile manipulation robots directly based on task success over relevant tasks.
Teaser Image

Recent interest in mobile manipulation has resulted in a wide range of new robot designs. A large family of these designs focuses on modular platforms that combine existing mobile bases with static manipulator arms. They combine these modules by mounting the arm in a tabletop configuration. However, the operating workspaces and heights for common mobile manipulation tasks, such as opening articulated objects, significantly differ from tabletop manipulation tasks. As a result, these standard arm mounting configurations can result in kinematics with restricted joint ranges and motions. To address these problems, we present the first Concurrent Design approach for mobile manipulators to optimize key arm-mounting parameters. Our approach directly targets task performance across representative household tasks by training a powerful multitask-capable reinforcement learning policy in an inner loop while optimizing over a distribution of design configurations guided by Bayesian Optimization and HyperBand (BOHB) in an outer loop. This results in novel designs that significantly improve performance across both seen and unseen test tasks, and outperform designs generated by heuristic-based performance indices that are cheaper to evaluate but only weakly correlated with the motions of interest. We evaluate the physical feasibility of the resulting designs and show that the are practical and remain modular, affordable, and compatible with existing commercial components.We open-source the approach and generated designs to facilitate further improvements of these platforms.

MoMa-CoDesign

Overview of our approach

MoMa-CoDesign maintains a distribution over design optimality based on Bayesian Optimization and Hyperband to propose new design parameters ω for evaluation. In an inner loop, we use a powerful reinforcement learning agent to learn a policy for this design. We then propose to directly use task-based success rates as a scoring function L to evaluate the design.

Generated Designs

We compare our approach against the standard tabletop-style mounting configuration as well as a heuristic-based performance index using the global manipulability. We generate designs for three robots made up of different components: a Franka 7 DoF arm with an omnidirectional base, the same Franka arm with a differential drive base, and a 6 DoF UR-5 arm with an omnidirectional base. We evaluate all designs across a set of representative mobile manipulation tasks, shown in the video below.

Code

A software implementation of this project based can be found in our GitHub repository for academic usage and is released under the GPLv3 license. For any commercial purpose, please contact the authors.

Publications

If you find our work useful, please consider citing our paper:

Raphael Schneider, Daniel Honerkamp, Tim Welschehold, and Abhinav Valada
Task-Driven Co-Design of Mobile Manipulators
Under review, 2024.

(PDF) (BibTeX)

Authors

Raphael Schneider

Raphael Schneider

University of Freiburg

Daniel Honerkamp

Daniel Honerkamp

University of Freiburg

Tim Welschehold

Tim Welschehold

University of Freiburg

Abhinav Valada

Abhinav Valada

University of Freiburg

Acknowledgment

This work was partially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG): 417962828, an academic grant from NVIDIA, and the BrainLinks-BrainTools center of the University of Freiburg.