Manipulator motion planning for high-speed robotic laser cutting

International audienceRecent advances in laser technology, and especially the essential increase of the cutting speed, motivate amending the existing robot path methods, which do not allow the complete utilisation of the actuator capabilities as well as neglect some particularities in the mechanical design of the wrist of the manipulator arm. This research addresses the optimisation of the 6-axes robot motions for continuous contour tracking while considering the redundancy caused by the tool axial symmetry. The particular contribution of the paper is in the area of multi-objective path planning using graph-based search space representation. In contrast to previous works, the developed optimisation technique is based on the dynamic programming and explicitly incorporates the verification of the velocity/acceleration constrains. This allows the designer to define interactively their importance with respect to the path-smoothness objectives. In addition, this optimisation technique takes into account the capacity of some manipulator wrist axes for unlimited rotation in order to produce more economical motions. The efficiency of the developed algorithms has been carefully investigated via computer simulation. The presented results are implemented in a commercial software package and verified for real-life applications in the automotive industry