Coordinating the motions of robot arms in a common workspace

A time/space planning system to coordinate the actions of two robot manipulators for transfer movements in a "sparse" environment is reported here. The collision avoidance reasoning guarantees that arms will arrive safely at their destination by temporally delaying or by altering the path of one arm. End effectors are constrained to follow elliptical motions. The performance of the system is sufficient in normal circumstances to drive an execution module in real time with tool tip speeds of about 3 in/s.