The Motion Planning of the Hyper-Redundant Manipulators

Efficient control of industrial robots is an important issue to the success of industrial automation. The motion planning of robot manipulators is one of the challenging problems encountered in this field. A new method for the motion planning is presented in this paper. The basic idea is to find a smooth path consisting of points close enough to each other. Then the computation of the inverse kinematics for these points is accomplished with the help of a geometrical method to solve the problem of multi-solution caused by redundancy. This geometrical method finds one optimal solution to the inverse kinematics of redundant or hyper redundant manipulators from these infinite solutions with fewer computations. This method can be used for any planar n-serial manipulators. Experiments are conducted on a 4-links hyper-redundant manipulator to demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed method.