Abstract
Traditional motion planning techniques consider the problem of collision-free motion of an articulated robot as a global high level planning problem for one agent with internal degrees of freedom. The consequence is centralized explicit control of all joints. We suggest a simple multi-agent approach to motion planning with local low level collision avoidance. The control is distributed and there is no explicit control of the joints. Each individual link of a robot is a self-contained agent and the motion planning problem is formulated as a constraint satisfaction problem. Equations of motion for the multi-agent system incorporate satisfaction of the equality constraints between joined agents, while artificial forces ensure the satisfaction of inequality constraints preventing collisions. The artificial forces are local to each individual agent and solution of the equations of motion gives an emergent behaviour of the multi-agent system. The presented method has been successfully applied to various problems, including the simulation of a multi-tool robot and a 19-link snakelike robot moving through a maze. Finally, the method is used in an actual application: an industrial robot welding ship sections.
Lars Overgaard wishes to thank the Danish Research Academy and Odense Steel Shipyard Ltd. for their financial support.
The authors wish to thank all members of the AMROSE research team.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Overgaard, L., Petersen, H.G., Perram, J.W. (1996). Motion planning for an articulated robot: A multi-agent approach. In: Perram, J.W., Müller, JP. (eds) Distributed Software Agents and Applications. MAAMAW 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1069. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61157-6_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61157-6_32
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