Joint trajectory generation for redundant robots in an environment with obstacles

The problem of determining collision-free joint space trajectories for redundant robots is considered, and the command-generator approach is used to generate such trajectories. In this approach, a distance objective function is defined and is optimized along the robot joint trajectories through a vector in a null space. Algorithms for implementing this optimization problem are fully developed. It is shown that the proposed collision-free trajectory generation scheme is efficient and practical. Extensive simulation results of a four-link robot example are presented and analyzed