Spline-RRT⁎: Coordinated Motion Planning of Dual-Arm Space Robot

Abstract

This paper addresses the coordinated motion planning issue for a dual-arm free-floating space robot. Based on the sampling-based planning method, a novel coordinated RRT⁎-based path planning framework is proposed for a dual-arm manipulation. First, an asymptotically optimal sampling-based method, RRT⁎, is employed to generate the initial rough path for each end-effector in the task-space. To avoid self-collision, we present a coordinated strategy which samples from separated inertial spaces when performing RRT⁎ algorithm. Second quartic, splines are used to smooth the generated RRT⁎ path so that the robot can execute smoothly. Physical constraints including the end-effectors’ limit, joint limit and boundary conditions are all controlled within the design of the quartic splines. The effectiveness of the proposed path planning framework is illustrated and demonstrated via a kinematically redundant dual-arm space robot.