Task-oriented redundancy resolution and obstacle avoidance for kinematically redundant robots

Planning for effective manipulation of redundant robot systems requires approaches which can take account of the DOF, task and constraints. In this paper, task-oriented robot arm redundancy resolution is introduced and a new approach to obstacle avoidance for redundant robots is proposed. In this development task-related reachability, redundancy, dexterity and collision avoidance are discussed. A nonlinear programming method is used to avoid problems caused by pseudo-inverse based methods. The globally optimal solution is obtained by maximizing the dexterity whilst satisfying task requirements, limits on joint angles and obstacle avoidance. It is not necessary to balance the weightings between the user-defined cost term and those needed to manage constraints in a cost function. There is no joint configuration drift, no Cartesian trajectory drift and no configuration jumps over an obstacle in the resulting configurations. Other forms of inequality constraints can also be easily dealt with