AN ONLINE CARTESIAN SPACE OBSTACLE AVOIDANCE SCHEME FOR ROBOT ALMS

This paper presents an on-line obstacle avoidance scheme for robot arm s. This method is directly formulated in the Cartesian space and uses complete information about the workspace. The strategy is to detect th e collision and to plan the motion of each link successively, starting from the base link. Each robot link in 3D Cartesian space will be map ped into two 2D planes such that the collision detection and motion pl anning can be executed in 2D spaces. Depending on its spatial shape, t he end-effector can be approached as further robot links. Thus, the ob stacle avoidance is more effectively including the consideration of en d-effector. The proposed algorithm is implemented on a transputer netw ork which simulates the control system of a six-link robot PUMA 560.