Local motion planning avoiding obstacles with dual quaternions

The authors describe an implementation of a motion planner that automatically avoids collisions with obstacles. This planner is based on a `virtual contact´ concept between robot and environment. A virtual contact can be described as a simple algebraic manifold in the components of the dual quaternion representing the position and orientation of the end-effector. The path planning is formulated as an optimization problem where such manifolds as inequality constraints are introduced. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of this method applied to a wrist-partitioned robot with 6 revolute joints