Optimal Trajectory Planning for Energy Minimization of Serial Manipulators

Abstract

Robotic manipulators have been widely used in almost fields, such as in the industrial field, the military field, the outer space field, and so on. They can protect human from severe environment, such as high temperature, high risk environment. Because of the compact structure, less occupied space and flexibility of the serial manipulators, they are the most widely used kind robotic manipulators. To mitigation the energy crisis, research on energy saving of serial manipulators is carried out. In this dissertation, trajectory planning methods are presented and combined with optimization method for energy minimization of the serial manipulators. First, the kinematic analysis and dynamics analysis of the serial manipulators are done. With these analysis connected with our target of energy minimization, a appropriate performance index is introduced as our objective function. Second, to obtain the performance index for energy minimization, different interpolation methods for trajectory planning of the serial manipulators are presented for different kinds of constraints to obtain the dynamic basis functions. Then, with optimization method combined with presented trajectory planning methods, the algorithms for different kinds of constraints with different trajectory planning methods are obtained. At last, the excavator arm is taken as the model for simulation. With obtained algorithms, the optimal parameters for trajectory planning with energy minimization and minimum performance index of the excavator arm are obtained. Thereby the optimal trajectories of the excavator arm for different trajectory planning methods are obtained.