A numerical approach for time-optimal path-planning of kinematically redundant manipulators

Abstract

SUMMARY In this paper, a numerical approach is proposed to solve the time-optimal path-planning (TOPP) problem of kinematically redundant manipulators between two end-points. The first step is to transform the TOPP problem into a nonlinear programming problem by an iterative procedure. Then an approach to find the initial feasible solutions of the problem is proposed. Since initial feasible solutions can be found easily, the optimization process of the nonlinear programming problem can be started from different points to find the global minimum. A planar three-link robotic manipulator is used to illustrate the validity of the proposed approach.