Effect of robot kinematics on motion planning in unknown environment

In [1,2], a class of non-heuristic path planning algorithms was introduced for a point automaton moving in a planar environment with unknown obstacles. The approach (called Continuous Path Planning, or CPP) was extended then in [6,14] to a planar robot arm. The general idea is to reduce the problem to analysis of simple closed curves on the surface of an appropriate two-dimensional manifold. No constraints on the shape of obstacles or of robot links are imposed. Some details of the resulting procedures turn out to depend on specifics of the arm kinematics. In this paper, various kinematic configurations of planar two-link arms with revolute and sliding joints are analyzed. It is shown that, with appropriate modifications, the CPP approach applies to all of these arms.