Developing strategies for manipulator path planning with orientation constraints

The paper discusses the work undertaken at the UK National Advanced Robotics Research Centre in the area of path planning. Experiments have been undertaken with the best first planner (BFP) and random path planner (RPP) algorithms developed at Stanford University by Barraquand & Latombe (Rep. no. STAN-CS-89-1259, 1989). These look particularly suitable for solving a wide range of motion planning problems and for providing the basic mechanism for path planning in an advanced robotic architecture. From this basic mechanism higher level strategies have been developed to enable paths to be planned with a predefined orientation of the end effector at the goal location or maintaining an orientation throughout the whole path. These functions are achieved through placing additional constraints on the search through configuration space and modifying the workspace potential