An Integrated Approach Towards Trajectory Planning for Mobile Robots Operating on a Machine Shop Floor

On a machine shop floor mobile manipulators offer a viable and feasible solution for part transportation, loading and unloading operations among various machine tools/machining centers. The order of complexity of such systems is between that of an AGV and a Robotic Work Cell. This paper addresses two sets of problems for a mobile robot navigating on a machine shop floor; (i) developing a network of feasible paths i.e. a roadmap, through the robot’s free space, and (ii) generating a trajectory between any two specified locations on the roadmap. These tasks are programmed and the simulation runs with snapshots are presented to highlight the algorithm and software. The algorithm to find the optimum path is different from normally used A* or shortest path algorithms, instead it is given the name “Minimize the Target Distance (MTD)” algorithm.

Keywords:

Mobile Robots , path planning , trajectory generation , cell decomposition , roadmaps , voronoi diagrams , generalized voronoi graphs