Spline-RRT*: Coordinated Motion Planning of Dual-Arm Space Robot

This paper addresses the coordinated motion planning issue for a dual-arm free-floating space robot. Based on the sampling-based planning method, a novel coordinated RRT*-based path planning framework is proposed for a dual-arm manipulation. First, an asymptotically optimal sampling-based method, RRT*, is employed to generate the initial rough path for each end-effector in the task-space. To avoid self-collision, we present a coordinated strategy which samples from separated inertial spaces when performing RRT* algorithm. Second, quartic splines are used to smooth the generated RRT* path so that the robot can execute smoothly. Physical constraints including the end-effectors' limit, joint limit and boundary conditions are all controlled within the design of the quartic splines. The effectiveness of the proposed path planning framework is illustrated and demonstrated via a kinematically redundant dual-arm space robot. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.