Real-Time Sensor-Based Motion Planning for Robot Manipulators

In this paper, a sensor-based motion planning method for robot arm manipulators operating among unknown obstacles of arbitrary shape is presented. It can be applied to on-line collision avoidance with no prior knowledge of the obstacles. The sensitive skin is used to build a description of the robot’s surroundings. This approach is based on the configuration space but the construction of the C-obstacle surface is avoided. The motion planning algorithm consists of three phases. In each phase, the point automation moves along a specified plane, on which the mapping of the obstacles into configuration space can be simplified. Hence, the computation time is reduced and the algorithm can work in real time. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a series of simulations.