An Approach to Collision-Free Motion Planning of Robot Manipulator

Abstract

In this paper, an approach to plan collisionfree motions for general robot manipulators based on the artificial potential function in joint space is proposed. The potential function is defined as the intersection of the obstacles and the path which is described by some sine functions in the joint space. The collision-free path is obtained by minimizing the value of this potential function using the steepest decsent method. Since the obtained path is constructed by the sums of some sine functions, it is ensured to be smooth. The proposed algorithm is applied to the movement of the manipulators with two and three links and its effectiveness is shown by computer simulation.