Suboptimal trajectory generation for industrial robots using trapezoidal velocity profiles

This paper presents a new method to generate suboptimal trajectories for serial manipulators in both configuration and Cartesian space. The method is based first on the dissociation of the search of optimal transfer time T from that of optimal trajectory profiles. Kinematic and dynamic constraints can then be treated in an easy manner because most of them can be transformed into bounds on the value of T. In addition, trajectory profiles are generated using trapezoidal velocity profiles that reduce the number of optimization parameters to two only. This makes the real-time trajectory generation possible and its implementation on existing industrial controllers quite easy. Furthermore, a stochastic optimization method is suggested to obtain a good approximation of the global optimal motion.