OPTIMAL RENDEZVOUS-POINT SELECTION FOR ROBOTIC INTERCEPTION OF MOVING-OBJECTS

A Plumber of active prediction planning and execution (APPE) systems h ave recently been proposed for robotic interception of moving objects, The cornerstone of such systems is the selection of a robot-object re ndezvous-point on the predicted object trajectory. Unlike tracking-bas ed systems, which minimize the state difference between the object and the robot at each control period, in this methodology the robot is se nt directly to the selected rendezvous-point. A line-motion tracking s trategy would then be employed for grasping the moving object, Herein, a novel strategy for selecting the optimal (earliest) rendezvous-poin t is presented, For objects with predictable trajectories, this is a s ignificant improvement over previous APPE strategies which select the rendezvous-point from a]limited number of non-optimally chosen candida tes.