OBSTACLE AVOIDANCE OF REDUNDANT DISCRETELY-ACTUATED MANIPULATORS USING WORKSPACE DENSITY FUNCTIONS
Eric Lanteigne, Amor Jnifene · Transactions of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering · 2009
This paper presents an obstacle avoidance method for discretely-actuated planar manipulators with a large number of serially connected modules. The method uses a direct combination of the manipulator workspace density functions and obstacle density maps to solve the inverse kinematics of the manipulator, thus avoiding the geometrical modelling of obstacles and the computation of the nearest point distance between the manipulator and the obstacles. Simulations on a seventeen-module planar manipulator operating in a workspace with circular obstacles have demonstrated the viability of the obstacle avoidance algorithm. This paper presents a detailled description of the proposed method and a summary of the results.