Trajectory planning for coordinately operating robots

Abstract

An efficient locally minimum-time trajectory planning algorithm for coordinately operating multiple robots is introduced. The task of the robots is to carry a common rigid object from an initial position to a final position along a given path in three-dimensional workspace in minimum time. The number of robots in the system is arbitrary. In the proposed algorithm, the desired motion of the common object carried by the robots is used as the key to planning of the trajectories of all the non-redundant robots involved. The search method is used in the trajectory planning. The planned robot trajectories satisfy the joint velocity, acceleration and torque constraints as well as the path constraints. The other constraints such as collision-free constraints, can be easily incorporated into the trajectory planning in future research.