Motion planning in industry

Description

This project focuses on designing and implementing a generic motion planner, that plans in Cartesian space, the robots workspace. The planner should be applicable for many degrees of freedom industrial manipulators and the service robot Amigo.

VDL Industrial Modules’ main reasons for automation are the repeatability and accuracy advantages of a robot. Furthermore reducing the costs of assembly is another core issue for innovation. The orders of VDL Industrial Modules are typically small; therefore the manipulator has to exhibit flexibility. Small set-up times are required for the robot to be profitable.

A whole-body controller is developed for Amigo, which needs a global motion planner to avoid local minima and for accurate replanning i.e. avoiding or getting out of minima. One of the key issues is fast trajectory generation, possible at the expense of optimality.