A new obstacle avoidance method for discretely actuated hyper-redundant manipulators

In this paper, a new method is proposed for solving the obstacle avoidance problem of discretely actuated hyper-redundant manipulators. In each step of the solution, the closest collision to the base is removed and then the configuration of the next part of the manipulator is modified without considering the obstacles. This process is performed repeatedly until no collision is found. The Suthakorn method is applied to solve the inverse kinematics problem. Two new ideas are proposed to reduce the errors of this method: the two-by-two searching method, and iterations. To verify the proposed method, some problems are solved numerically for 2D and 3D manipulators, each in two different obstacle fields, and the results are compared with those obtained by the genetic algorithm method. (C) 2012 Sharif University of Technology. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.