Efficient path planning for cooperating manipulators

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