  Mobile manipulators have been used for inspection, maintenance and repair
tasks over the years, but there are some key limitations. Stability concerns
typically require mobile platforms to be large in order to handle far-reaching
manipulators, or for the manipulators to have drastically reduced workspaces to
fit onto smaller mobile platforms. Therefore we propose a combination of two
widely-used robots, the Clearpath Jackal unmanned ground vehicle and the Kinova
Gen3 six degree-of-freedom manipulator. The Jackal has a small footprint and
works well in low-clearance indoor environments. Extensive testing of
localization, navigation and mapping using LiDAR sensors makes the Jackal a
well developed mobile platform suitable for mobile manipulation. The Gen3 has a
long reach with reasonable power consumption for manipulation tasks. A wrist
camera for RGB-D sensing and a customizable end effector interface makes the
Gen3 suitable for a myriad of manipulation tasks. Typically these features
would result in an unstable platform, however with a few minor hardware and
software modifications, we have produced a stable, high-performance mobile
manipulation platform with significant mobility, reach, sensing, and
maneuverability for indoor inspection tasks, without degradation of the
component robots' individual capabilities. These assertions were investigated
with hardware via semi-autonomous navigation to waypoints in a busy indoor
environment, and high-precision self-alignment alongside planar structures for
intervention tasks.
