Real-time path planning for a robotic arm

Abstract

With robotics technology, services can be provided to care for individuals with disabilities. This paper describes an effort to improve path planning performance for a robotic arm, resulting in faster user response in real-time. For a robotic arm, particularly with multiple degrees of freedom, path planning is computationally expensive. We propose that it is possible to achieve rapid response times with an assistive robotic arm by caching frequent arm trajectories and creating a "roadmap" of arm movements. By calculating trajectories to possible target goals in advance, we anticipate an improvement in user response times.