OPTIMAL TRAJECTORY PLANNING OF MANIPULATORS: A REVIEW

Optimal motion planning is very important to the operation of robot manipulators. Itsmain target is the generation of a trajectory from start to goal that satisfies objectives,such as minimizing path traveling distance or time interval, lowest energy consumptionor obstacle avoidance and satisfying the robot’s kinematics and dynamics. Review,discussion and analysis of optimization techniques to find the optimal trajectory eitherin Cartesian space or joint space are presented and investigated. Optimal trajectoryselection approaches such as kinematics and dynamics techniques with variousconstraints are presented and explained. Although the kinematics approach is simpleand straight forward, it will experience some problems in implementation because oflack of Inertia and torque constraints. The application of Genetic Algorithms to find the optimal trajectory of manipulators especially in the obstacle avoidance is alsohighlighted. Combining the Genetic Algorithms with other classical optimizationmethods proves to have better performance as a hybrid optimization technique.