path planning of robot arm with collision avoidance

Hi guys,

i want to develop an algorithm to plan a path for the robot arm's tcp to avoid collisions using matlab, is there a good function or toolbox for this?

i am currently using robotics toolbox.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2023a/robotics/ug/check-for-environmental-collisions-with-manipulators.html

I can check for collisions in the link above, but I need to give a separate intermediate destination to avoid collisions. Is there an algorithm to automate all this?

https://www.mathworks.com/help/robotics/ug/design-manipulator-path-for-dispensing-task-ikd.html

This link shows how to manually create a non-conflicting trajectory, but it doesn't seem to be as efficient as I would expect.

I would like to know if there is an algorithm or toolbox that can automatically plan a path or trajectory with collision avoidance and if not, what functions or toolboxes can help for this purpose? i searched about that but couldn't find somthing helpful.

Thanks in advance for your help

Answer 1

[ag]

Hi Jaeho,

I understand that you need to implement path panning for a robotic arm, along with collision avoidance. To do so, you can use the “Probabilistic Roadmap” method (PRM). The PRM algorithm uses the network of connected nodes to find an obstacle-free path from a start to an end location.

The code snippet below shows how to do it:

startLocation = [2 1]; 
endLocation = [12 10]; 
path = findpath(prmSimple,startLocation,endLocation); 
show(prmSimple) 

For building the environment you will need to give the environment and number of points as input to the PRM.

For more details, please refer to the following documentation, https://www.mathworks.com/help/robotics/ug/probabilistic-roadmaps-prm.html

Hope this helps!

Best Regards,

Aryan Gupta