Bi-directional self-motion path planning of redundant manipulators

The self-motion path planning of redundant manipulators aims to seek a geometric path connecting an initial joint configuration and a desired joint configuration while keeping the end-effector's task variables unchanged. A bi-directional self-motion path-planning scheme was proposed for redundant manipulators in this work. The basic idea of the proposed scheme was to drive the real manipulator in the initial joint configuration and the virtual manipulator in the desired joint configuration to move in the self-motion manifold and converge to the same joint configuration, thus producing a geometric path connecting the initial joint configuration and the desired joint configuration. The proposed scheme is superior to previous ones as it is not inclined to fall into the local minimum joint configuration. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed path-planning scheme.