Time-Optimal Online Trajectory Generator for Robotic Manipulators

This work presents a trajectory generator for time-optimal maneuvering of a robotic manipulator in jointspace. This generator allows to adapt these maneuvers depending on external events received by the robot (e.g. from sensors or human input). Closed-form equations for these trajectories are provided, resulting on a computationally light algorithm which can update the trajectory at any time taking into account the current state of the robot and the final desired state. The contribution of this paper is an implementation of the algorithm which is available under LGPL for the use of the community. This implementation has been designed to work with KUKA Fast Research Interface (FRI). As a test-bed, a KUKA Light Weight Robot with seven degrees-of-freedom was used, and the experimental results are summarized in this article. The source code of the trajectory generator is available at https: //github.com/IDSCETHZurich/trajectory-generator