There is a need for highly redundant manipulators to work in complex, cluttered environments. We explore kinematics and path planning for highly redundant manipulators by meals of a coniinuous inaiiipulator model, which captures the macroscopic shape of highly redundant manipulators. A path for the continuous manipillator model can be found by finding a smooth path for it,s end-effector under a rnaxiiiium curvature/torsion constraint. Free space decomposition into primary convex regions is suited to finding such smooth paths. On t,op of the free space representatim, we have developed an algorit8hm to find a continuous curvature path in 2-1> with a maximum curvature constraint. We report on an experiment conducted to measure the efficiency of the algorithm. The 2-I3 path planning algorithm could he used for path planning in 3-U space by restricting the manipulator movement. Alternatively, 3-D free space can be decomposed into primary convex regions. ‘Ihe path planning problem has been shown to be PSPAGE-complete in terms of DOF of tlhe rnanipulator. However, DOF of the manipulator is a resource to be utilized in our approach, because the error bound on the mapping improves with the nuuiber of I)OF of the manipulator.
['Akira Hayashi', 'Benjamin Kuiperst']
A Continuous Approach To Robot Motion Planning With Many Degrees Of Freedom