Motion planning for gantry mounted manipulators: A ship-welding application example

We present a roadmap based planner for finding robot motions for gantry mounted manipulators for a line welding application at Odense steel shipyard (OSS). The robot motions are planned subject to constraints on when the gantry may be moved. We show that random sampling of gantry configurations is a viable technique for positioning the manipulator and present a pruning technique for managing the growth of the roadmap. We discuss results from simulations and from applications at the shipyard, where a similar planner has now been implemented for production.