Redundancy utilization for obstacle avoidance of planar robot manipulators

Abstract

Two obstacle avoidance criteria are developed, utilizing the kinematic redundancy of serial redundant manipulators having revolute joints and tracking pre-determined end effector paths. The first criterion is based on the instantaneous distances between certain selected points along the manipulator, called configuration control points (CCP), and the vertices of the obstacles. The optimized joint configurations are obtained by maximizing these distances. Thus, the links of the manipulator are configured away from the obstacles. The second criterion uses a different approach, and is based on Voronoi boundaries representing the equidistant paths between two obstacles. The optimized joint configurations are obtained by minimizing the distances between the CCP and control points selected on the Voronoi boundaries. The validities of the criteria are demonstrated through computer simulations.