Introduction of b-splines to trajectory planning for robot manipulators

Abstract

This paper describes how B-splines can be used to construct joint trajectories for robot manipulators. The motion is specified by a sequence of Cartesian knots, i.e., positions and orientations of the end effector of a robot manipulator. For a six joint robot manipulator, these Cartesian knots are transformed into six sets of joint variables, with each set corresponding to a joint. Splines, represented as linear combinations of B-splines, are used to fit the sequence of joint variables for each of the six joints. A computationally very simple, recurrence formula is used to generate the B-splines. This approach is used for the first time to establish the mathematical model of trajectory generation for robot manipulators, and offers flexibility, computational efficiency, and a compact representation.