On computing multi-arm manipulation trajectories

Abstract

This dissertation considers the manipulation task planning problem of automatically generating the trajectories for several cooperating robot arms to manipulate a movable object to a goal location among obstacles. The planner must reason that the robots may need to change their grasp of the object to complete the task, for example, by passing it from one arm to another. Furthermore, the computed velocities and accelerations of the arms must satisfy the limits of the actuators. Past work strongly suggests that solving this problem in a rigorous fashion is intractable. We address this problem in a practical two-phase approach. In step one, using a heuristic we compute a collision-free path for the robots and the movable object. For the case of multiple robot arms with many degrees of freedom, this step may fail to find the desired path even though it exists. Despite this limitation, experimental results of the implemented planner (for solving step one) show that it is efficient and reli...