Abstract:Wheeled mobile manipulators operating in indoor unstructured environments, which are subject to nonholonomic constraints such as a minimum turning radius and the inability to perform instantaneous lateral translation, face significant challenges in whole-body motion planning. Existing decoupled approaches often result in fragmented final paths due to the disconnected planning between the base and the manipulator. Meanwhile, high-dimensional sampling methods suffer from low computational efficiency and poor realtime performance. To address these problems, an innovative hierarchical path planning method is proposed. The method first employs an improved bidirectional dual-tree rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) algorithm. This algorithm directly incorporates a nonholonomic constraint model and simultaneously explores both forward and backward solution spaces to eliminate redundant computation, thereby generating a collision-free base path embedded with spatiotemporal information. Subsequently, for each temporal node along this base path, a set of feasible manipulator configurations is defined, all satisfying conditions including joint limits and static collision avoidance. Using these sets, a temporal-node-constrained RRT algorithm generates a manipulator path that is strictly synchronized with the base motion. Finally, the complete whole-body motion path is synthesized by aligning the base and manipulator waypoints through index matching. Both ROS simulations and physical experiments show that the algorithm proposed decouples the high-dimensional planning problem, enabling coordinated motion of the mobile base and manipulator in complex constrained environments while generating collision-free trajectories throughout the entire motion in real time. The experimental results indicate that the algorithm has significant advantages in planning time, path length, and smoothness. Compared with the RRT*-Connect algorithm, in complex scenarios, the proposed approach reduces planning time by 29.16% on average, decreases path length by 16.68%, and improves path smoothness by 56.13%.