A heuristic approach towards path planning and obstacle avoidance control of planar manipulator

Abstract

This paper addresses the development and application of heuristic control strategy to plan collision free configurations of a 5 D.O.F. planar robot manipulator, to position its end effector at the desired target with minimal error and convergence time, while avoiding the obstacles in the workspace. Four variants of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique is used as the heuristic approaches to solve the above problem. The efficiency and performance of the proposed approaches is investigated through both simulation and experimental studies. It is found out that the variant of PSO-W produces better results in terms of convergence and positional in scenarios such movements in environment with free obstacles, with one obstacle and two obstacle respectively with error less than 2.3% overall. Results revealed that the heuristic methods based on the search algorithms is a viable alternative over the traditional approaches for solving redundant manipulator problems constrained with nonlinearities and obstacles. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.