Efficient path planning strategies for cooperating manipulators in environments with obstacles

This paper describes a new approach to planning collision-free paths for cooperating robots with dependent tool center points (TCPs) in environments with obstacles. A method for a formal specification of these tasks is described and different planning strategies for different classes of tasks are presented. These planning strategies are designed for online planning in three-dimensional, realistic scenes. On the one hand, online planning demands results in very short time intervals. On the other, the planners have to cope with complex 3D environments. Following these requirements, the planners presented here avoid the complexity of a complete search and instead use heuristics