Robot cartography: a topology-driven discretization for redundant manipulators

This paper addresses manipulator redundancy from a global perspective, aiming at the kinematic control through the exploration of self-motion topology. The methodology is based on collecting information about the structure of the kinematic map with the use of topological tools, providing an overall view of the configuration space and its relationship to the work space-a suitable framework for the efficient implementation of global approaches. A space discretization method has been developed to benefit from the topological structure, embedding kinematics in its representation. This method enables an efficient exploration of global redundancy resolution and path planning offering the means to avoid local minima and deadlock; with reduced effort. A planar 3-DOF manipulator with joint limits is used to illustrate the methodology and the implementation results are compared with standard techniques to demonstrate its advantages