This paper introduces a strategy to accomplish pick-and-place operations for a six-degrees-of-freedom (6-DOF) robotic arm attached to a wheeled mobile robot. This research work is part of a bigger project in developing a robotic-assisted nursing to be used in medical settings. The significance of this project relies on the increasing demand for elderly and disabled skilled care assistance which nowadays has become insufficient. Several methods were implemented to make a 6-DOF manipulator capable of performing pick-and-place operations. This paper presents an approach for solving the inverse kinematics problem and planning collision-free paths. An Iterative Inverse Kinematics method (IIK) was introduced to find multiple configurations for the manipulator along a given path. The IIK method takes advantage of a specific geometric characteristic of the manipulator, in which several joints share a common plane. Ten different scenarios with different number and pattern of obstacles were used to verify the efficiency of a path planning algorithm introduced here. Other methods, also implemented in the current project, which describe the manipulator and its capabilities, are presented elsewhere [1]. Overall results confirmed the efficiency of the implemented methods for performing pick-and-place operations for a 6-DOF manipulator.
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