Path planning of 3-RRR parallel robot by avoiding mechanical interferences via Artificial Potential Field

This paper deals with the collision-free path planning of planar parallel robot by avoiding mechanical interferences and obstacle within the workspace. For this purpose, an Artificial Potential Field approach is developed. As the main contribution of this paper, In order to circumvent the local minima problem of the potential fields, a novel approach is proposed which is a combination of Potential Field approach, Fuzzy Logic and also a novel algorithm consisting of Following Obstacle as well as Virtual Obstacle methods, as a hybrid method. Moreover, the inverse kinematic problem of the 3-RRR parallel robot is analyzed and then the aforementioned hybrid method is applied to this mechanism in singular-free case. It is worth mentioning that, in this paper, all the probable collisions, i.e., the collision between the mechanism and the obstacles and also among the links, are taken into accounts. Two general cases have been considered in collision-free path planning simulation; the first case considered a mobile robot in several workspaces and the second one was assigned to the 3-RRR parallel robot path planning. Results of the simulations, which are implemented in C programming language for the sake of real-time purposes. reveal that for the both cases, the newly proposed hybrid path planning method is efficient enough for the mobile robot, or the end-effector of the planar parallel robot to reach the goal without colliding with the obstacles.