A manipulation motion planner for dual-arm industrial manipulators

In this paper, we propose a general manipulation planner for dual-arm industrial manipulators. According to the context, the planner automatically determines whether both arms have to be used simultaneously or not. The approach is based on (i) the extension of an object placement algorithm previously developed in [23], and (ii) the introduction of several types of re-grasping motions dedicated to dual-arm manipulators. Such motions induce a special topological structure in the manipulation space that can be captured into a manipulation graph. The graph is then used to solve the manipulation problem by a simple graph search algorithm. After searching for a solution path, we further consider optimizing the path by minimizing the number of re-grasps. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on the dual-arm manipulator HiroNX working in a realistic factory environment.