Obstacle-imposed constraints on the motion of manipulators in the work space

Obstacles within a robot's work space impose constraints on the motion of the robot. These motion constraints have to be taken into account during the collision-free path planning process. We investigate the problem of representing these motion constraints in the robot's work space. In general, these motion constraints could be placed on any part of the robot. We present a novel approach to transfer all these motion constraints on the end effector of the robot. Therefore, planning the motion for any complex robot can be treated as planning the motion for its end effector. The main advantage of this technique is that the motion planning problem can be solved in a lower dimensional work space rather than in a high dimensional configuration.