Lazy motion planning for robotic manipulators

Robotic manipulators are making a shift towards mobile bases in both industry and domestic environments, which puts high demands on efficient use of the robot’s limited energy resources. In this work, the problem of reducing energy usage of a robot manipulator during a task is investigated. We achieve this by allowing the robot to rest on a surface, i.e., by making it lazy. Energy reduction is often formulated as an optimization problem, which due to the high dimensionality and nonlinearity of robot manipulators is often computationally expensive. This is avoided by separating the task into two parts and subsequently using feedback linearization and optimization on each part.