A combinatorial approach to trajectory planning for binary manipulators

Binary manipulators are powered by actuators which have only two stable states. Therefore, they can reach only a discrete (but possibly large) number of locations. Compared to a manipulator built with continuous actuators, a binary manipulator provides reasonable performance, and is relatively inexpensive (up to an order of magnitude cheaper). The number of states of a binary manipulator grows exponentially with the number of actuators. This makes the calculation of its inverse kinematics quite difficult. This paper presents a combinatorial method for computing the inverse kinematics of a binary manipulator that reduces the search space to a manageable size. It also creates reasonably smooth motions that follow a specified trajectory accurately (in both position and orientation), despite the discrete nature of binary actuation