Trajectory path planning

Introduction
In robot application it is frequently necessary for the manipulator to follow a planned path between goal
points. For some applications such as welding and painting, it is necessary for the manipulator to follow
the shape of the object on which it is working, while in other applications we may need to include and
specify some points called via-points along the desired path to let the manipulator avoid any obstacles
on its way.
Trajectory path planning can be defined as the process of computing a sequence of positions, velocities
and accelerations for the manipulator which will cause it to move through the desired sequence of
configurations. From the definition, a path is different from a trajectory. A path is generally used to
denote the time history of only the position and oriented of the manipulator. On the other hand, the
trajectory is used when velocity, acceleration and jerk profiles are included.
Trajectory planning is performed in either Cartesian coordinates or Joint coordinates. A path is usually
more realizable in Cartesian coordinates, where it is expressed as a set of positions and orientations for
the robot end-effector (Lee, et al.,1986; Fu, et al., 1987). In contrast, torques/forces bounds on the
actuators are expressed in joint coordinates. Therefore, we have to either transform the given set of the
end-effector locations to joint coordinates, and then solve for the joint-path planning, or alternatively
transform the actuator bounds to Cartesian coordinates and solve for the Cartesian-path planning(paul
1979). The second way was investigated in (paul 1979; Luh and Lin, 1981), and it was found that it is a
very heavy computational procedure(luh et al.,1980). On the other hand, planning in the joint space
would involve only the transformation of Cartesian positions and orientations to its equivalent joint
values. Therefore, this type of planning has been investigated in great details (lee et al.,1986). To
achieve the planning in joint mode,the Cartesian end-effector path is transformed to its equivalent joint-
space by means of the inverse kinematics. However, since such a transformation is defined only as
pointwise, selected points on the Cartesian path should be choosen. Hence, apart from the start and
end points, several via-points are required. These via-points can carry vary in both number and
separation, depending on the path to be followed. Thus, a longerpath may require a larger number of
points. In addition, certain geometric constraints may be imposed on the path as in the case of the
presence of obstacles, for which more via-points are needed.