Method and apparatus for planning motions of robot manipulators
OwnerPang C. Chen, Yong K. Hwanginventors
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Abstract
Method and apparatus for automatically planning motions of robot manipulators. The invention rapidly finds a collision-free path in a cluttered robot environment, if one exists, from any starting configuration of the robot manipulator to any ending configuration. The time to solution of a motion planning problem is not uniform, but proportional to the complexity of the problem.
Claims45
A method for moving a robot manipulator comprising a plurality of joints through a workspace containing obstacles from a preselected starting robot manipulator configuration to a preselected goal robot manipulator configuration, the method comprising the steps of:
- a) selecting as subgoals robot manipulator configurations for which attitudinal positions are unspecified for one or more joints;
- b) generating a sequence of the subgoals that connect the starting robot manipulator configuration to the goal robot manipulator configuration;
- c) verifying that the generated sequence of subgoals is collision-free;
- and
- d) moving the robot manipulator from the starting robot manipulator configuration to the goal robot manipulator configuration such that a path of configurations defined by the generated sequence of subgoals is followed by the robot manipulator.
An apparatus for moving a robot manipulator comprising a plurality of joints through a workspace containing obstacles from a preselected starting robot manipulator configuration to a preselected goal robot manipulator configuration, said apparatus comprising:
- means for selecting as subgoals robot manipulator configurations for which attitudinal positions are unspecified for one or more joints;
- means for generating a sequence of said subgoals that connect said starting robot manipulator configuration to said goal robot manipulator configuration;
- means for verifying that said generated sequence of subgoals is collision-free;
- and
- means for moving said robot manipulator from said starting robot manipulator configuration to said goal robot manipulator configuration such that a path of configurations defined by said generated sequence of subgoals is followed by said robot manipulator.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.