Environment-aware motion planning for EAST Optical Diagnostic Beam Orientation Robot

EAST Optical Diagnostic Beam Orientation Robot (EODBOR) is designed for the calibration of the visible optical diagnostic system before the plasma experiment, which can orientate light beams with high precision. At present, the motion of EODBOR is purely controlled by the operators during the whole calibration process since planning algorithms based on prior knowledge of the environment cannot be adopted due to the intrinsically unstructured property of EAST's vacuum vessel. To automate the calibration, we upgraded our previous system and propose a method for environment-aware motion planning based on Robot Operating System (ROS). In this method, the probabilistic octree is used to represent unknown objects in the environment, which is updated with point clouds from an RGB-D camera mounted at the end of the manipulator. We verify the feasibility and stability of the proposed method through simulations and experiments.