Snake-based path planning for redundant manipulators

An energy-minimizing contour, or snake, is composed of a set of connected splines and has equations of motion such that it will try to reach a configuration at which it is at a minimum energy. A potential field representation of the workspace is used as an environment into which the snake, representing a manipulator, is placed. The snake is then guided by these image forces and can thus be used to plan paths for highly redundant manipulators in two or three dimensions. The method is fast, and directly suitable for parallel processing, and has the potential to provide real-time path planning for such robots. Results are given which show the paths found both in two and three dimensions for redundant manipulators