Dynamic trajectory optimization in real time for moving obstacles avoidance by a ten degrees of freedom manipulator

A method is addressed for real-time dynamics trajectory optimization of kinematically redundant manipulators. The considered task of trajectory planning is to teach interactively position and orientation of the tool-center point frame, which is fixed in the manipulator hand. Thereby the manipulator has to autonomously preserve explicitly formulated kinematic constraints such as moving obstacle avoidance, singularity avoidance, and box-constraints on joint positions as well as dynamic constraints like box-constraints on joint velocities, accelerations and motor torques. The key idea is to transform the resulting overall motion planning problem into a time series of point-to-point trajectory planning problems, which, in turn, may be formulated as parameter optimization problems, that can be efficiently solved in real-time by the numerical method of sequential quadratic programming. Since the approach does not require an inverse kinematics formulation it is feasible for manipulators with redundant kinematics.