Trajectory Planning for Reconfigurable Industrial Robots Designed to Operate in a High Precision Manufacturing Industry

This paper presents an algorithm for an automated planning of time-jerk optimal trajectories on a reconfigurable robot with an anthropomorphic structure. The trajectory planning algorithm is designed to provide reachable input set-points for the reconfigurable control system to accommodate not only changes in task objectives but also various reconfigurations of the robot kinematic structure and motion behavior adaptation in response to operational constraints. Firstly, appropriate reference frames are defined on the robotic modules and the position and orientation of the end effector in the Cartesian space is dynamically generated through a reconfigurable forward kinematics module. Secondly, through an iterative inverse kinematic method, the robot configuration space for the start and goal destinations and the geometric path for every motion tasks are generated. Finally, the joint space trajectories with coordinated motion profiles are generated by incorporating the motion laws and joint kinematic parameter values. The general outcome of the algorithm is a trajectory plan of the robot joints expressed as a time history of the robot motion. The trajectories aredynamically generated to satisfy widely varying tasks, constraints and objectives aiming towards a fully reconfigurable control without any hardware or software adjustment. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.