REAL-TIME COLLISION-AVOIDANCE FOR REDUNDANT MANIPULATORS

This paper presents a simple and robust approach to achieving collisio n avoidance for kinemetically redundant manipulators at the control-lo op level. The proposed scheme represents the obstacle avoidance requir ement as inequality constraints in the manipulator workspace, and ensu res that these inequalities are satisfied while the end-effector track s the desired trajectory. The control scheme is the damped-least-squar es formulation of the configuration control approach implemented as a kinematic controller. Computer simulation and experimental results are given for a Robotics Research 7 DOF redundant arm and demonstrate the collision avoidance capability for reaching inside a truss structure. These results confirm that the proposed approach provides a simple an d effective method for real-time collision avoidance.