Sensor-based motion planning for highly redundant kinematic structures. II. The case of a snake arm manipulator

For pt. I see IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (1992). A continuation of the authors´ work on sensor-based motion planning for highly-redundant kinematic structures is presented. Previously, a planar, snake-like robot freely moving amidst obstacles of arbitrary shape was considered. It is now assumed that the tail of the snake is fixed, i.e., the snake is a redundant arm manipulator. The manipulator is capable of sensing obstacles in the vicinity of any point of its body. The task is to move the head of the manipulator from a starting position to a target while avoiding collisions with obstacles. A procedure is presented which avoids the computational explosion due to link multiplicity by emulating a passive reaction of the manipulator´s body to a continuous pull at the head and to the surrounding obstacles. This results in a local link-by-link (instead of a global closed-form) processing, and produces an efficient real-time algorithm. A computer simulation showing robust motion planning in an obstacle-filled environment is presented