<title>Real-time motion planning for robot application in flexible manufacturing systems</title>

Abstract

This paper presents approaches to real-time motion planning for robot application in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), which are based on an algorithm for fast mapping obstacles from a workspace (W-space) into a configuration space (C-space) by defining fundamental obstacles in W-space. The mapping time for a two-dimensional obstacle is about constant. To plan a collision-free path for a master robot in a multiple robot system, a free subspace is built by computing slice C-space obstacles, while swept volumes produced during master robot motion are computed as additional moving obstacles for a generation of a collision-free path for a slave robot. For robot motion planning with many degrees of freedom, several types of reactive behavior are defined to coordinate motion conflicts between different links and the approach to motion planning with a few degrees of freedom is adopted to quantitatively realize reactive behavior. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches, graphical simulation experiments are reported.