Collision avoidance analysis of reachable workspaces for redundant manipulators

Presents an analysis of reachable workspaces for redundant robot manipulators in the presence of obstacles. By taking advantage of the redundancy, a robot can continuously change its configuration so that the desired position of the end point is kept fixed. With this capability, the reachable workspace of a redundant robot is characterized based on the spatial relations between the links of the robot and predefined obstacles. A method for computing the collision-free region and obstructed region of the end point of a redundant robot is presented. To demonstrate the proposed method, the analysis based on a 3R planar robot and disk-like obstacles is worked out in detail. The results obtained can be applied to determine the layout of robot tasks to prevent collisions between the links of the redundant robot and obstacles.<>