A Parallelization Algorithm for Real-Time Path Shortening of High-DOFs Manipulator

Abstract

The paths generated by sampling-based path planning are generally not smooth and often generate multiple unnecessary robot posture changes in the task space. To mitigate such issues with a planned path from sampling-based path planners, shortcut-based path shortening algorithms are commonly adopted in the field of robot manipulator path planning as a post-processing step. In this paper, we analyze shortcut-based algorithms and propose a new approach based on the idea of parallelism for faster path shortening so that it can be more applicable in environments where a path has to be generated as quickly as possible to avoid collisions with other moving objects around the manipulator. Through performance comparisons in simulations, it is shown that the proposed approach can obtain a well-shortened as well as much smooth path compared to the original path faster than conventional shortcut-based algorithms and an optimization-based approach developed for collision-free path generation.