Motion Planning for an Underwater Swimming Manipulator Using BMA-RRT* and the Geometric Follow-the-Leader Method
Yiwei Zhao, Chao Ren, Shugen Ma · 2024
The Underwater Swimming Manipulator (USM) is a novel type of underwater robot that can autonomously and flexibly execute underwater tasks by leveraging its redundant degrees of freedom. Currently, there is a lack of motion planning methods specifically designed for USMs. In this paper, a USM with 14 degrees of freedom is introduced and a motion planning framework for it is designed. The framework consists of a path planner based on Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) and an inverse kinematics (IK) solver based on the geometric Follow-the-Leader (FTL) strategy. Then, BMA-RRT* is proposed to address the limitations of the existing MDA-RRT* algorithm. Simulation results in a 3D environment show that BMA-RRT* improves overall performance compared to MDA-RRT*, and the feasibility and efficiency of proposed framework are validated.