Time Optimal NURBS-Based Acc-Jerk Limited Trajectory Planning for Serial Manipulators

This paper presents an acceleration-jerk limited trajectory planning scheme for serial manipulators. First, the trajectory of a robot is designed in the Cartesian space using the non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) curve then, the position commands of the end-effector are obtained by the NURBS interpolator containing the acc-jerk limited feedrate profile along the trajectory. The feedrate profile for the end-effector motion is optimized using an optimization method in which the constraints of velocity, acceleration and jerk of all joints are taken into account to minimize the total machining time. To evaluate the accuracy of the analytical method for the kinematic and dynamic analyses, the results for the KUKA KR۱۶ as a serial manipulator are compared with the outcomes from the SimMechanics. The results confirmed that the proposed optimized acc-jerk limited trajectory planning is capable of providing smooth motions for all joints of the robot with the specified confined kinematic constraints.