Motion Planning of Redundant Manipulator With Variable Joint Velocity Limit Based on Beetle Antennae Search Algorithm

Redundant manipulators play important roles in many industrial and service applications by assisting people fulfill heavy and repetitive jobs. However, redundant manipulators are coupled highly-nonlinear systems which exert difficulty of redundancy resolution computation. Conventional methods such as pseudo-inverse-based approaches obtain the resolved joint angles from joint velocity level, which may bring about more computational cost and may neglect joint velocity limits. In this work, a motion planning method based on beetle antennae search algorithm (BAS) is proposed for motion planning of redundant manipulators with the variable joint velocity limit. Such proposed work does not need to resolve the velocity kinematics equation as the conventional methods do, and the proposed method can directly deal with the forward kinematics equation to resolve the desired joint angles. The simulation and experiment on the five-link planar manipulator and the Kuka industrial manipulator system demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method for motion planning of redundant manipulator, and reveal the reliable performance of the BAS algorithm as compared with genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), firefly algorithm(FA) and quantum behaved particle swarm algorithm(QPSO) methods.