A cell based voronoi roadmap for motion planning of articulated robots using movement primitives

The manufacturing industry today is still focused on the maximization of production. A possible development able to support the global achievement of this goal is the implementation of a new support system for trajectory-planning, specific for industrial robots. This paper describes the trajectory-planning algorithm, able to generate trajectories manageable by human operators, consisting of linear and circular movement primitives. First, the world model and a topology preserving roadmap are stored in a probabilistic occupancy octree by applying a cell extension based algorithm. Successively, the roadmap is constructed within the free reachable joint space maximizing the clearance to the obstacles. A search algorithm is applied on robot configuration positions within the roadmap to identify a path avoiding static obstacles. Finally, the resulting path is converted through an elastic net algorithm into a robot trajectory, which consists of canonical ordered linear and circular movement primitives. The algorithm is demonstrated in a real industrial manipulator context.