Novel method of obstacle avoidance planning for redundant sliding manipulators

In this paper, a weighted additional deviation velocity on the basis of the gradient projection (GP-WADV) method is proposed to solve obstacle avoidance problems of the redundant manipulator under the condition of known end-effector trajectory. The GP-WADV method aims to find the point closest to the obstacle on the link of the manipulator and attach the additional deviation velocity with weighting factors to the point on the basis of the gradient projection method. Utilizing multi-solution characteristics of redundant robots, obstacle avoidance control parameters related to the distance between obstacles and links are proposed according to the gradient projection method for solving inverse kinematic solution. Moreover, a weighted method is adopted to adjust the weighting factors of the primary motion velocity and the additional motion velocity when the link approaches the obstacle, so as to obtain the joint angle solutions more quickly and accurately. The GP-WADV method can ensure that the manipulator can avoid obstacles smoothly without turbulence and solve the highly nonlinear relationship between the position of the manipulator and the joint coordinate, which has the advantages of small amount of calculation, more flexible and convenient real-time control. The advantages of the proposed GP-WADV method are proved by simulation and experiments.