Contributed by the Mechanisms Committee for publication in the JOURNAL OF MECHANICAL DESIGN. Manuscript received March 1999. Associate Editor: G. S. Chirikjian.
Industrial manipulators are frequently required to perform different tasks and to carry different masses. Further, if a manipulator operates in space crowded with obstacles, it must follow a planned path very closely to avoid collisions, especially if other moving objects are present. To follow trajectory and the velocity profiles simultaneously is a difficult task. One option is to divide the problem into two parts: path planning and speed control. Usually, the desired trajectory is given as a sequence of knots (positions of the robot’s tip) in space Cartesian coordinates, where the velocity and the acceleration of the joints are subject to constraints. The control is performed at the joint level and it is desirable, therefore, to construct the trajectory at that level. The given knots are first...
