Toward planning and control of highly redundant manipulators

An approach to the path planning of redundant robot manipulators has been developed by exploring paths for a completely flexible manipulator having an infinite number of degrees of freedom. The idealized manipulator is called a continuous curvature model. It is controlled by changing its curvature. The major advantage of the approach is that the complexity of path planning is dependent only on the complexity of the environment, not on the number of degrees of freedom of actual manipulators. A new architecture is not required to map the solutions obtained for the continuous curvature model. A manipulator with 12 ball joints has been chosen as a target hardware architecture and the solution obtained for the continuous curvature model has been mapped to the manipulator, its dynamic simulation has been successfully performed