The arm was enough. The feet were the problem.

A manipulator is a robot that does its work through an end effector mounted at its tip. To reach the work point, it has either been installed in a fixed position or carried on an AMR or a biped or quadruped platform. But because the arm and the mobile platform share a single base, every constraint of the mobile platform carries straight over to the arm’s work.

Access

If the AMR cannot get over a door sill or a cable tray, the robot arm cannot enter that workspace either.

Reach

For a fixed arm, where the robot stands decides its work area. In a space beyond its working range, such as a wide workbench, the end effector cannot reach the work point.

Precision

Reaction forces from the work travel back into the mobile platform. On biped and quadruped platforms, the body’s posture control and the arm’s control have to be handled together, which makes control for precision work more complex.

Solving these problems the conventional way meant bringing in a different robot for every environment, or heavily rebuilding the existing workspace to suit the robot.