PATH-BASED APPROACH TO INTEGRATED PLANNING AND CONTROL FOR ROBOTIC SYSTEMS

Our newly developed event-based planning and control theory is applied to robotic systems. It introduces a suitable action or motion referen ce variable other than time, but directly related to the desired and m easurable system output, called event. Here the event is the length of the path tracked by a robot. It enables the construction of an integr ated planning and control system where planning becomes a real-time cl osed-loop process. The path-based integration planning and control sch eme is exemplified by a single-arm tracking problem. Time and energy o ptimal motion plans combined with nonlinear feedback control are deriv ed in closed form. To the best of our knowledge, this closed-form solu tion was not obtained before. The equivalence of path-based and time-b ased representations of nonlinear feedback control is shown, and an ov erall system stability criterion has also been obtained. The applicati on of event-based integrated planning and control provides the robotic systems the capability to cope with unexpected and uncertain events i n real time, without the need for replanning. The theoretical results are illustrated and verified by experiments. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevi er Science Ltd.