A supervised path planner

Presents a supervised path planner for a cartesian manipulator devoted to contour tracking. While tracking a contour by a biaxial system, there is always a compromise between the quickness of the whole operation and the accuracy subject to the contour errors: in practice, the manipulator is not able to follow exactly the desired trajectories elaborated previously. The maximum velocity and acceleration are not constant throughout the entire workspace; for some motions high velocities and accelerations can be achieved, while for others the maximum velocity and acceleration should be decreased due to the actuator limitations, otherwise the contour error would be intolerable. To prevent this drawback, the path-planner presented is combined with a supervision layer. The objective of this is to calculate the possible local trajectories which ensures the control loop linearity and increases the path-tracking performances.<>