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.