The sequential framework for developing motion planners for many degree of freedom manipulators: Experimental results

A sequential framework that allows planners for manipulator arms with many degrees of freedom to be developed is addressed. The essence of this framework is to exploit the serial structure of manipulator arms and decompose the n-dimensional problem of planning collision-free motions for an n-link manipulator into a sequency of smaller m-dimensional subproblems, each of which corresponds to planning the motion of a subgroup of m-1 links. Extensive experimental results within the sequential framework are presented for a variety of manipulators. A main goal of these simulations (1) to show the effectiveness of the sequential approach with the backtracking mechanism, and (2) to quantify the improvement of the backtracking mechanism and the trade-off between the number of backtrackings and the execution time of the planner. The experiments show that the sequential framework with the backtracking mechanism is quite efficient for manipulator arms with many degrees of freedom.