A line-based obstacle avoidance technique for dexterous manipulator operations

Cameras are often used for visual servoing or realtime mapping of the external environment in both autonomous and teleoperated tasks with a dexterous manipulator. Nominal operations will likely produce manipulator configurations that occlude the line-of-sight from the camera to a target of interest. In this paper, a technique is developed that treats the camera line-of-sight as a virtual obstacle in order to prevent camera occlusion. The approach is based on using virtual point charges to represent obstacles and using the self-motion of the arm to avoid collisions. The approach is demonstrated on the Ranger Dexterous Manipulator.