Trajectory planning using optimum solution of variational problem

A new method of trajectory planning for robot manipulators is proposed, in which the reference in joint space is expressed as a B-spline curve, and is optimized by the variational method. This has an advantage in less required memory for the reference path. The performance index includes the trajectory position error and the acceleration term of each joint with weight coefficients. The characteristics of optimized trajectory is determined by weight coefficients. A new design method is proposed to set up the weight coefficients. Through calculations and experiments, it is verified that the proposed design method is both useful and effective.<>