Simplified motion planning strategies in flexible manufacturing

We present two feasible strategies for planning manipulators motions in low-dimensional spaces. The problem of avoiding collisions in an assembly cell is solved by analyzing separately the movements of a simple two-link chain and the displacement of the gripper. The free motions of the arm are planned by locally computing the C-space and incrementally refining a cell decomposition. The free configurations of the gripper are simply obtained by table look-up. The cell decomposition of the C-space rests on fast collision detection. Our techniques may also be helpful for assembly cells where two robots cooperate.