A path planning algorithm for industrial robots

Instead of using the tedious process of robot teaching, an off-line path planning algorithm has been developed for industrial robots to improve their accuracy and efficiency. Collision avoidance is the primary concept to achieve such goal. By use of the distance maps, the inspection of obstacle collision is completed and transformed to the configuration space in terms of the robot joint angles. On this configuration map, the relation between the obstacles and the robot arms is obvious. By checking the interference conditions, the collision points are indicated with marks and collected into the database. The path planning is obtained based on the assigned marked number of the passable region via wave expansion method. Depth-first search method is another approach to obtain minimum sequences to pass through. The proposed algorithm is experimented on a 6-DOF industrial robot. From the simulation results, not only the algorithm can achieve the goal of collision avoidance, but also save the manipulation steps. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.