A motion planning system for a mobile robot with manipulator

This paper presents a motion planning system for an autonomous robot manipulator composed of a wheeled mobile platform equipped with a six degrees-of-freedom manipulator arm and evolving in an already known industrial environment. Given a geometric representation of both the robot and workspace, a description of the robot kinematics and a sequence of goal tasks, this system uses various adequate experts to determine a set of feasible trajectories linking the required configurations. Because of the complexity of the problem-planning the motions of a 9-d.o.f. structure-and the wish of reasonable performances, classical global methods had to be rejected in favour of specific experts (local heuristic and geometric trajectory planners) whose application is controlled by the spatial geometry of the workspace. For the same reasons, the system is actually decomposed into a manipulator trajectory planner and a vehicle trajectory planner coordinated by a general trajectory planner. This paper describes mainly the vehicle motion planner and gives only a brief overview of the complete system, along with some examples obtained in simulation.<>