Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators

Abstract

This paper presents an obstacle avoidance approach for manipulators based on an obstacle avoidance path planning mechanism. Although the obstacle dealt with in the paper is of the cubic type, it can be transformed to the spherical type as shown in the paper, which has a simpler analytical description. The obstacle avoidance problem has been formulated in terms of collision avoidance of links rather than points. Link collision avoidance is achieved by continuously controlling the link closest point to the obstacle. For the robot SIR-1 which has an articulated chain, a link can be represented as the line segment defined by the Cartesian position of its two neighboring joints. We implement a simple obstacle avoidance path planning algorithm.