Toward practical motion planners: experiments with a sequential search strategy

The authors have implemented a motion planner based on a novel sequential strategy to plan collision-free motions for serial manipulator arms among 3D polyhedral obstacles. The basic idea is to successively plan the motion of each link starting from the base link. Suppose that the motion of links till link i (including link i) has been planned. This already determines the path of one end (the proximal end) of link i+1. The motion of link i+1 is now planned along this path by controlling the degree of freedom associated with it-a 2D motion planning problem. This strategy results in one 1D (for the first link) and n-1 2D planning problems instead of one n-D problem. This greatly reduces complexity and is especially suitable for highly redundant arms. However, it is incomplete. Experimental results are given.<>