Preliminary Study on Motion Planning with Obstacle Avoidance for Hard Constrained Redundant Robotic Manipulators

Abstract

The motion planning for robotic manipulators is one of the most important and challenging problems of the robot control. The primary task of a robotic manipulator is to move its end-effector from an initial position and orientation to a predefined goal position and orientation. This research considers motion planning with obstacle avoidance for planar redundant robots with constrained joint space. It analyses their kinematics and defines the different types of inverse kinematics solutions. On the basis of those types of solutions in the robot workspace are defined zones corresponding to each solution type. The research proposes a numerical approach for finding the specific points at which the robot can change its solution type. Those points are of interest when the robot has to execute a motion which passes through different zones of the workspace which are not intersecting. In such cases the robot is required to pass through some of those points in order to be able to change the solution type and to execute the desired motion. The approach applicability is validated through conducted experiments.