Path planning of 6-DOF humanoid manipulator based on improved ant colony algorithm

Based on the D-H parameter method for solving the inverse kinematics of a six degree of freedom(6-DOF) manipulator, the motion planning of manipulator was developed in order to overcome the limitation of basic ant colony algorithm when the working platforms smaller and the barriers is almost the same size with the target. A new improved ant colony algorithm is present in this paper based on the rule of finding better path in shorter time. Application of VC++ 6.0 tool in the host computer can achieve the path planning algorithm. The experiment results show that ants can find a better path in a shorter time and avoid the obstacle by the improved ant colony algorithm. The global searching performance is better than the basic one.