New method of discrete trajectory planning for robot manipulators

This paper presents a method of segmental discrete trajectory planning for a robot manipulator. In this method, consistency of the time interval at the trajectory planning stage with the sampling time interval determined at the online trajectory tracking stage is taken into account. The time history of joint position and velocity along the given path is planned by means of nonlinear programming technique in order to satisfy dynamic constraints and optimize the given performance index. The planning example for Stanford Manipulator with 6 DOF shows the efficiency of this method. In comparison with another such method, the new discrete trajectory planning method reduces computation memory and run time sharply, and can be performed on ordinary microcomputers.