Soft Motion Trajectory Planner for Service Manipulator Robot

TL;DR

This paper introduces a soft motion trajectory planner for service robots that ensures safety and comfort during human interaction by limiting jerk, acceleration, and velocity, with real-world validation on a Mitsubishi robotic arm.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel online soft motion trajectory planner that integrates visual and force control for safe human-robot interaction in service robots.

Findings

Successfully limits jerk, acceleration, and velocity in real-time.

Produces cubic trajectories suitable for manipulation tasks.

Validated on a Mitsubishi PA10-6CE robot.

Abstract

Human interaction introduces two main constraints: Safety and Comfort. Therefore service robot manipulator can't be controlled like industrial robotic manipulator where personnel is isolated from the robot's work envelope. In this paper, we present a soft motion trajectory planner to try to ensure that these constraints are satisfied. This planner can be used on-line to establish visual and force control loop suitable in presence of human. The cubic trajectories build by this planner are good candidates as output of a manipulation task planner. The obtained system is then homogeneous from task planning to robot control. The soft motion trajectory planner limits jerk, acceleration and velocity in cartesian space using quaternion. Experimental results carried out on a Mitsubishi PA10-6CE arm are presented.