Path-planning Algorithm Research Of Industrial Robots

One of the ultimate goals in Robotics is to create autonomous robots. Since robot can be viewed as an effective extension of human's motor ability, it is sure to be indispensable in the course of recognition and exploration of the world. Due to its important role in theory and application, the motion planning of industrial robot has been given enough attention by researchers in the world.Many researchers have been investigated on the path planning for various objectives such as minimum time, minimum energy, and obstacle avoidance. Two main problems have been studied on the path planning of industrial robot in recent years. One problem is the obstacle avoidance speediness of the robot during it's working; the other problem is how to guarantee the optimization of the path we searched. Owing to the complexity of the configuration space and the speediness of the robot's working demand, the former has huge challenge for the path planning of the robot; the latter has much difficulty for there are lots of limits relating to the time used to search the optimizing path. The main results as the following:1. Build the motion model according to the 6 DOF industrial robots. One is the motion model of the ABB IRB1400 industrial robot whose joints are all rotating; the other is the model of the RK10S industrial robot which is similar to the ABB IRB1400 industrial robot.2. Instead of using the tedious process of robot teaching, an off-line path planning algorithm based on wave expansion method has been developed for industrial robots. The continuous Cartesian W-space in world coordinates is discretized into an equidistant 3D-grid and then the free points and obstacle points are indicated by different numbers. By use of the wave expansion method, the free points are further assigned marked number. The path is finded based on the assigned marked number via wave expansion method. As comparison, depth-first search method is presented. The proposed algorithm is tested on a ABB IRB1400 6-DOF industrial robot under ENVISION circumstance and the expected results are obtained.3. Based on island-driven search strategy, genetic algorithm is present to plan path in robot's configuration space in demand of the robot's work. The proposed algorithm is tested ona RK10S 6-DOF industrial robot under ENVISION circumstance. The effectiveness and validity of this approach are proved by theoretical analysis and simulation results.