Active motion planning and collision avoidance for redundant manipulators

High-speed assembly makes strict demands on path and trajectory planning systems. In such systems the stages of path planning, trajectory planning, and 'low-level' control are normally separated, which admits functional simplicity but may not produce the most useful trajectories. Thus we have been exploring the possibility of merging the levels, by allowing the path planner to generate the trajectory information. By considering the 'active forces' that need to be generated by the robot's actuators we are also able to consider explicitly the robot's dynamics. We explain the approach and give some preliminary simulation results.