Collision-Free Trajectory Generation for Robot Manipulator by Optimizing B-Spline Control Points.

Abstract

A new algorithm is proposed to generate a collision-free trajectory for a robot manipulator. In this method, joint trajectories are described by uniform B-spline curves and the control points which represent initially specified joint trajectories are improved by the nonlinear optimization technique called Complex Method. The algorithm makes use of two advantages. The first one is that control points of B-spline curves uniquely, continuously, and locally describe joint trajectories. The second one is that the Complex Method does not require the gradient of performance index which represents the interference between manipulator links and obstacles and which evaluates the goodness of the trajectories. The proposed algorithm is simple and easily applicable. The effectiveness is also confirmed by examples for the trajectory generation of multijoint manipulators.