Planning the Collision-Free Paths of an Actively Flexible Manipulator

摘要

Most robot manipulators consist of a small sequence of rigid links connected byarticulated joints. Additional joints make it possible to manipulate objects in cluttered environments where non-redundant robots are useless. In this paper, we consider a simulated actively flexible manipulator (AFM), i.e. a manipulator whose flexibility can be directly controlled by its actuators. We propose an efficient method for planning the collision-free paths of an AFM in a three-dimensional workspace. We implemented this method on a graphic workstation and experimented with it on several examples.