A global approach to path planning for redundant manipulators

This paper presents a new approach to path planning for redundant manipulators. The path planning problem is posed as a finite time nonlinear control problem which can be solved by a Newton-Raphson type algorithm together with an exterior penalty function method. This technique is capable of handling various goal task definitions as well as incorporating both joint and task space constraints. The algorithm has shown promising results in planning joint path sequences to meet Cartesian goal planning and path following. In contrast to local approaches, this algorithm is less prone to problems such as singularities and local minima. Applications to planar 3R and 4R arms, cooperating 3R arms and a spatial 9 DOF arm are included.