Optimal Trajectory Planning with Safety Constraints

Abstract

The rise of collaborative robotics has offered new opportunities for integrating automation into the factories, al- lowing robots and humans to work side-by-side. However, this close physical coexistence inevitably brings new constraints for ensuring safe human-robot cooperation. During our research, we developed a trajectory planning algorithm to produce minimum- time yet safe motion plans along specified paths in shared workspaces with humans. To this end, a safety module was used to evaluate the safety of a time-optimal trajectory iteratively. A safe replanning module was developed to optimally adapt the generated trajectory online whenever the optimal plan violates dynamically provided safety limits.