An approach to on-line obstacle avoidance for robot arms

Presents an approach to on-line obstacle avoidance for fixed-base robot manipulators. It guarantees a collision-free path for the robot during real-time operations. This approach is based on analytic geometry and is suitable for continuous path control. Considering the potential collision with obstacles, the next trajectory point to move to is corrected. This strategy is direct formulated in the operational space in which the tasks are described and applicable for two-dimensional as well as for three-dimensional space. Because this algorithm requires no access to joint control, it can be also used for commercial robots given the desired path. One can assign it for various robots, here the implementation for the PUMA 560 is presented as an example