A Genetic Approach to the Motion Planning of Redundant Mobile Manipulator Systems Considering Safety and Configuration

This paper presents a genetic algorithm approach to multi-criteria motion planning of a mobile manipulator system considering position and configuration optimisation. Travelling distance and path safety are considered in planning the motion of the mobile system. A wave front expansion algorithm is used to build the numerical potential fields for both the goal and obstacles by representing the workspace as a grid. The unsafeness of a grid point is defined as the numerical potential produced by obstacles. For multi-criteria position and configuration optimisation, obstacle avoidance, least torque norm, manipulability and torque distribution are considered. The emphasis is put on using genetic algorithms to search for global optimum and solve the minimax problem for torque distribution. Various simulation results from two examples show that the proposed genetic algorithm approach performs better than conventional methods.