Experiments in dual-arm manipulation planning

The problem of dual-arm manipulation planning is to plan the path of two cooperating robot arms to carry a moveable object from a given initial configuration to a given goal configuration amidst obstacles. The authors survey previous work in manipulation planning and relate it to this analysis. A formal configuration space presentation of the problem is given. Three implemented planners are described. These three planners operated in a two-dimensional workspace and addressed increasingly difficult versions of the dual-arm manipulation problem. They were implemented in the C language. Execution times given were obtained by running them on a DEC 5000 workstation.<<ETX>>