Behavior Based Robot Motion Planning With Many Degrees of Freedom in Unknown Environments
Wei Li · 1995
Abstract This paper presents a new approach to motion planning for a manipulator with many degrees of freedom, which is based on defining several types of reactive behavior, such as, moving toward a target, avoiding obstacles, folding up links, following edges, and so forth. Motion planning with many degrees of freedom suffers mainly from kinematical redundancy, i.e., it is hard to determine which links and how many links should be moved so that the end-effector can reach a specific target point from a start point in complex environments. Using reactive behavior with simple features, complex motion planning can be qualitatively formulated with ease. In order to formulate reactive behavior quantitatively, a manipulator with many degrees of freedom is first decomposed into several two-link sub-manipulators, and motion planning of these two-link manipulators is performed by an algorithm for few degrees of freedom. This method can be easily implemented, and in combination with sensors it is suitable for robots with many degrees of freedom that operate in uncertain environments. Some examples are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.