Natural Dynamics of Robot Manipulators in the Presence of Obstacles

This paper presents the natural dynamic control problem of robot manipulators and its application to collision avoidance and path planning. A set of moving convex obstacles (or polyhedron) are modeled to achieve the desired conditions for collision detection and avoidance. The conditions represent a set of inequality constraints which are automatically incorporated to assure collision free motion. A minimum dimensional problem is achieved through the use of the null space of the Jacobian matrix associated with the constraint equations. A simple example to illustrate the procedures developed above is given.