A practical motion planner for PUMA 560

Abstract

A motion planner is implemented that plans collision-free motions for a PUMA 560 manipulator arm among stationary obstacles. The basic idea behind the approach is a novel sequential search strategy that successively plans the motion of each link starting from the base link. The strategy results in one 1-dimensional (the first link is degenerate) and n-1 2-dimensional planning problems instead of one n-dimensional problem for an n-link manipulator arm. The search strategy leads to a fast and efficient algorithm and is especially suited for highly redundant arms. However, the penalty is that the strategy may miss certain paths. In the current implementation for the PUMA 560, only the first three links of the arm are considered.<>