Experiments of on-line path following under joint limits for an industrial robot manipulator

This paper presents an experimental case study concerning the application of an on-line inverse kinematics algorithm ensuring tracking of the assigned end-effector path to a six-dof industrial robot manipulator. The desired trajectory to be followed by the manipulator in the presence of velocity and acceleration joint limits is generated on-line while the robot manipulator is in motion. Path tracking is achieved by properly slowing down the task-space trajectory via a time warp when joint limits are encountered. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the adopted algorithm and show that the desired path is kept as much as possible.