Real-time collision-free path planning for robot manipulator

This paper presents a real-time calculation method to generate the trajectory of robot manipulator for the purpose of avoiding collision. In order to model 3-D workspace, we use octree which has been used for fast collision detection. The levels of octree are used as the cost function to represent the distance between the manipulator and the obstacles. This criterion is not exact, but, due to this, we can obtain the approximate feasible trajectory extremely quickly. We will show the effectiveness of our method with some simulation examples. For example, the proposed method can solve a problem within 1 second on Intel 80486 processor running at 33 MHz. It has taken more than half an hour with one of the previously proposed methods.