An Asymmetric Collision-Free Optimal Trajectory Planning Method for Three DOF Industrial Robotic Arms

To improve the speed and dynamic adaptability of robotic arm trajectory planning, a collision-free optimal trajectory planning method combining non-uniform adaptive time meshing and bounding box collision detection was proposed. First, the dynamics and objective function of the asymmetric industrial robotic arm with three degrees of freedom (DOF) was formulated in the form of the dynamic optimization problem. Second, the control vector parameterization (CVP) was improved to enhance the computational performance of the problem. The discrete grid was adaptively adjusted according the trend of control variables. Then, a quick and effective collision detection strategy was used to avoid obstacles and to speed up calculation efficiency. The non-collision constraint is built by transforming the collision detection into the distance between two points, and then is combined into the dynamic optimization problem. The solution of the new optimization problem with the improved CVP leads to the higher calculation performance and the avoidance of obstacles. Lastly, the Siemens Manutec R3 robotic arm is taken as an example to verify the effectiveness of the planning method. The approach not only reduces computation time but also maintains accurate calculations, so that optimal trajectory can be selected from symmetric paths near the obstacles. When weights were set as & lambda;(1) = & lambda;(2) = 0.5, the solution efficiency was improved by 33%, and the minimum distance between the robotic arm and obstacle could be 0.08 m, which ensured that there was no collision.