Path-Constrained Time-Optimal Motion Planning for Robot Manipulators With Third-Order Constraints

Planning time-optimal motions of robot manipulators is important for maximizing productivity in industry and has attracted much attention in academia. Time-optimal time scaling (TOTS) of specified paths subject to second-order constraints is a well-studied problem in robotics. However, there is still a lack of effective approaches for computing TOTS with higher order constraints. This article proposes a novel method for TOTS subject to third-order constraints. The proposed method formulates the third-order TOTS as a four-stage optimization involving only linear programming by exploiting the special structure of the problem. The proposed method first performs a backward pass and a forward pass to generate the second-order optimal velocity profile. Then, the points violating the third-order constraints are identified, and the constraint violations are eliminated through numerical integration around the violating points. A bisection search algorithm is proposed to quickly determine the switching points at which the elimination process begins. The proposed method is verified through numerical examples and experimental tests. The results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of solution quality and computation time.