A Continuous Approach to Robot Motion Planning with Many Degrees of Freedom

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 means of a continuous manipulator model, which captures the macroscopic shape of highly redundant manipulators. A path for the continuous manipulator model can be found by finding a smooth path for its end-effector under a maximum curvature/torsion constraint. Free space decomposition into primary convex regions is suited to finding such smooth paths. On top of the free space representation, we have developed an algorithm to find a continuous curvature path in 2-D with a maximum curvature constraint. We report on an experiment conducted to measure the efficiency of the algorithm. The 2-D path planning algorithm could be used for path planning in 3-D space by restricting the manipulator movement. Alternatively, 3-D free space can be decomposed into primary convex regions. The path planning problem has been shown to be..