Comparative Analysis of Interpolation Methods for 7-DoF Manipulator Robot Trajectory Planning

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of various interpolation techniques for trajectory planning of a 7-DoF Panda Robot under Robot Operating System(ROS2) environment. Total six distinct interpolation techniques, namely linear, circular arc, quadratic, cubic, quintic polynomial, and Bezier curves are implemented and analyzed. Various trajectories are evaluated based on root mean square error(RMSE) of empirical estimation of waypoints between estimated and true joint angles. The implementation relies on ROS2 environment to achieve real time trajectory interpolation and use error metrics offered by ROS2 for quantifying the performance of the trajectory interpolation process of each of the proposed methods. By reducing the number of waypoints and comparing the resulting joint angle accuracies, we set up strong correlations between waypoint density and trajectory precision for each interpolation method. The results provide valuable outcomes for choosing suitable methods and evaluating the corresponding errors to meet the requirement and Robot control for robotic applications in terms of accuracy, computational cost, and smoothness of trajectories. This work advances the development of heuristic, optimal and efficient motion planning algorithms for Industrial robotic systems especially for applications that require high accuracy of trajectory tracking.