Avoiding obstacles and resolving kinematic redundancy

While obstacles in a robot workspace can effectively reduce the number of degrees of freedom, there need not be a corresponding loss of functionality for kinematically redundant mechanisms. In this paper, disk-like obstacles for a planar three-bar mechanism are classified. The extended Jacobian technique is used to implement an obstacle avoidance technique based on optimizing a distance criterion. The feasibility of applying multiple constraints or optimality criteria for resolving redundancy is investigated.