A path planning heuristic for robotic manipulators

A practical solution to path planning problem for a six-degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator with arbitary payload has been implemented. This problem in its most general form has been shown to be intractable, so most researchers in the field simplify the problem in some way. Often these simplifications make the resulting path planner of little practical use. In this paper an overview of a practical path planner is given. Heuristics are used to plan for the last three degrees of freedom of the robot and its payload, and the details of one of these heuristics is described. The use of heuristics makes the planner incomplete, but for all tasks programmed for the robot the planner has not failed to find a path