Generating Motion of Cooperating Robots—The Dual Arm Case

Abstract

Modern production lines rely on the extended use of cooperating robots as a basis of multiple tasks such as assembling, welding, painting, etc. Thus, there is a high need of automated motion generation of the involved industrial robots. This chapter presents an intelligent search algorithm for the motion planning of 13 DOF Dual arm industrial robots. The main purpose of the algorithm is the definition of all the intermediate Dual Arm robot’s configurations which lead the robot’s end effectors from the initial positions to the desired positions and orientations. The search algorithm is based on the gradually approach of all the alternatives configurations and evaluates them. The gradually approach of the configurations is limited from a grid which is based on a set of parameters and aims to reduce the computational time. Grid resolution as well as the values of the parameters are changeable and depends on the estimation level. Automatic motion planning is used in order to automatically generate free collision paths of the robot. In this way the programmer has to define only the end position of the robot and not the intermediate points for ensuring free collision paths. All the selected configurations constitute the desired path of each arm of the dual arm robot from the initial configurations to the final positions. In this way, an opportunity for automatic generation of the desired paths is given to unexperienced programmers.