Ellipsoidal Modeling for Articulated Robot Manipulators for Interactive Motion Planning

Abstract

The report presents an enclosing and enclosed ellipsoids based solid modeling technique for serial links of articulated robot manipulators. This modeling allows the collision detection for interactive robot motion planning in a graphical simulation environment or in a telerobotic simulator be performed efficiently and precisely. A systematic way of determining the kinematic transformation matrices between links and its associated ellipsoids model is presented. An example, a PUMA560 manipulator, is shown in details to demonstrate the proposed modeling technique.