Path Planning for an Omnidirectional Mobile Manipulator by Evolutionary Strategy

A path planning method is described for an omnidirectional mobile manipulator by applying an evolutionary strategy. For a path using B-spline, it is important to note how to choose some appropriate data points and the corresponding end points. The proposed approach can automatically select their points in a wide range, minimizing or maximizing the total cost function, which consists of several sub-cost functions such as motion smoothness, movable range of joint, singular orientation, falling down and obstacle avoidance. The simulation result shows that our method is useful for the path planning of a robot, which has many constraints and complicated evaluation like a mobile manipulator considered here.