Local motion planning avoiding obstacles with dual quaternions

Abstract

The authors describe an implementation of a motion planner that automatically avoids collisions with obstacles. This planner is based on a 'virtual contact' concept between robot and environment. A virtual contact can be described as a simple algebraic manifold in the components of the dual quaternion representing the position and orientation of the end-effector. The path planning is formulated as an optimization problem where such manifolds as inequality constraints are introduced. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of this method applied to a wrist-partitioned robot with 6 revolute joints.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>