A Bezier Curve Based Free Collision Path Planning of an Articulated Robot

The main objective of this paper is to find a path for the robot arm from its given start point to its desired goal point in an automated manner without collision with the obstacles. This paper investigates the problem of path planning for a 5 axis robot, operating in environment with obstacles whose boundaries are enveloped by cubic shape. The path planning approach presented is developed in the robot joint space and consists of three steps. The first step is to used Bezier curve technique , the second step is to generate a sufficient number of intermediate points in Cartesian space along Bezier curve and the third step is to convert the coordinate of the generated intermediate points from it's Cartesian space into joint space and move the robot arm along the free collision generated path. This work is not limited to theoretical studies or simulations, experiments have been run with various tests, on a LabVolt R5150 robot to assess the real efficiency and usability of the adopted method. The method applies to robots in a fixed and known environment. A number of experiments were carried out to test the ability of the robot arm to reach it's goal without collision. Experiment results verify the effectiveness of the method developed in this paper.