Path Planning for Highly Redundant Manipulators Using a Continuous Model

Abstract

There is a need for highly redundant manipulators to work in complex, cluttered environments. Our goal is to plan paths for such manipulators efficiently. The path planning problem has been shown to be PSPACE-complete in terms of the number of degrees of freedom (DOF) of the manipulator. We present a method which overcomes the complexity with a strong heuristic: utilizing redundancy by means of a continuous manipulator model. The continuous model allows us to change the complexity of the problem from a function of both the DOF of the manipulator (believed to be exponential) and the complexity of the environment (polynomial), to a polynomial function of the complexity of the environment only. Introduction Highly Redundant Manipulators Redundant manipulators have more degrees of freedom (DOF) than necessary for a specified class of tasks. There is a need for highly redundant manipulators to work in complex, cluttered environments. Their applications include passing trough restricted ...