Collision-free path planning for a redundant manipulator based on PRM and potential field methods

Abstract

The collision-free path of a manipulator should be regenerated in the real time to achieve collision safety when obstacles or humans come into the workspace of the manipulator. A probabilistic roadmap (PRM) method, one of the popular path planning schemes for a manipulator, can find a collision-free path by connecting the start and goal poses through the roadmap constructed by drawing random nodes in the free configuration space. The path planning method based on the configuration space shows robust performance for static environments which can be converted into the off-line processing. However, since this method spends considerable time on converting dynamic obstacles into the configuration space, it is not appropriate for real-time generation of a collision-free path. On the other hand, the method based on the workspace can provide fast response even for dynamic environments because it does not need the conversion into the configuration space. In this paper, we propose an efficient real-time path planning by combining the PRM and the potential field methods to cope with static and dynamic environments. The PRM can generate a collision-free path and the potential field method can determine the configuration of the manipulator. A series of experiments show that the proposed path planning method can provide robust performance for various obstacles. © ICROS 2011.