Study on Obstacle Avoidance Method for Highly Redundant Robotic Arms

Obstacle avoidance is an important concept to be considered when a robotic system is installed in an environment. Obstacles within the working space of a robotic system can prevent the robot from performing the tasks assigned to it properly; hence, the designer of the robotic system must program the robot to follow an emergency strategy that enables it to avoid any contact with a probable obstacle anywhere anytime within the working space of the robot. For mobile robots, this task is relatively easier to accomplish since these robots have the flexibility to change their routes and take alternatives that are free of obstacles. For fixed robotic manipulators the situation is much more complex because in this case the only way to avoid an obstacle is to change the spatial configuration of the robotic manipulator which requires a sophisticated solution for the inverse kinematics problem of such redundant robotic systems. This is not an easy task however. In this paper, we are only concerned with obstacle avoidance techniques and present a real-time obstacle avoidance method for fixed, highly redundant robotic manipulators that combines the benefits of both global and local techniques in that it can be used for both static and dynamic environments with a reduced computational effort.