Motion Planning of Robot Arms for Collision-free Path using Interval Analysis (1st Report, Application to Two-dimensional Problems)

Abstract

This paper discusses a method to find a collision-free path of industrial robot manipulators in a known environment where collision detection between manipulators and obstacles is necessary. The configuration of robot manipulators is represented based on the concept of configuration space (C-space) whose coordinates correspond to degrees of freedom of manipulators. Geometric criteria of collision between two dimensional manipulators and obstacles are formulated and estimated in each region of segmented C-space by using interval analysis. Based on this estimation, the shortest path from given starting point to end point in C-space is obtained by Dijkstra algorithm through the series only of the feasible regions where it is guaranteed that manipulators do not collide with obstacles. Validation of this algorithm is tested by a couple of numerical examples.