Journal of Computer and Communications, 2019, 7, 1-16 http://www.scirp.org/journal/jcc ISSN Online: 2327-5227 ISSN Print: 2327-5219 DOI: 10.4236/jcc.2019.75001 May 15, 2019 1 Journal of Computer and Communications Optimal Positioning of Mobile Platforms for Accurate Manipulation Operations Iker Lluvia 1 , Ander Ansuategi 1 , Carlos Tubío 1 , Loreto Susperregi 1 , Iñaki Maurtua 1 , Elena Lazkano 2 1 IK4-TEKNIKER, Eibar, Spain 2 Faculty of Informatics, University of the Basque Country, Donostia, Spain Abstract Many mobile robotics applications, especially in industrial environments, re- quire the robot to perform safe navigation and then reach the goal with a high precision. In this research work, the objective is to analyze the appropriate- ness of autonomous natural navigation strategies for mobile manipulation tasks. The system must position itself in a realistic map, follow a path closely and then achieve an accurate positioning in the destination point in order to be able to perform the manipulation, inspection or pick task efficiently. Au- tonomous navigation is not able to fulfill the accuracy required by some of the jobs so that a second positioning system using vision is proposed in this paper. The experiments show that localization systems have, on average, an error greater than a decimetre and how an additional positioning system can reduce it to a few millimetres. Keywords Mobile Robot, Mapping, Localization, Vision, Accurate Positioning 1. Introduction Natural navigation aims to design robot systems able to navigate without mod- ifying the environment, i.e., without adding extra infrastructure to it. Nowadays, those robot navigation techniques’ performance changes considerably depend- ing upon the environment, as their effectiveness directly depends on the features placed for the robot to localize. The sensors readings are matched against the map, and the pose is estimated based on the resemblance between them. As a consequence, the more featured the surroundings, the easier the system localizes How to cite this paper: Lluvia, I., Ansua- tegi, A., Tubío, C., Susperregi, L., Maurtua, I. and Lazkano, E. (2019) Optimal Positioning of Mobile Platforms for Accurate Manipula- tion Operations. Journal of Computer and Communications, 7, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.4236/jcc.2019.75001 Received: April 2, 2019 Accepted: May 12, 2019 Published: May 15, 2019 Copyright © 2019 by author(s) and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access