On Multi-Arm Manipulation Planning

This paper considers the automatic generation of motion paths for several cooperating robot arms to manipulate a movable object between two configurations among obstacles. To avoid collisions the robots may have to change their grasp of the object, for example, by passing it from one arm to another. The case where the movable object can only be moved by two arms acting simultaneously is also considered. An approach for solving this planning problem is described and illustrated with a robot system made of three arms moving in a 30 environment. Experiments with a planner implementing this approach show that it is not only fast, but also reliable in finding collision-free paths. Acknowledgments: This research was funded by ARPA grant NOOO14-92-5-1809. Y. Koga is supported in part by an NSERC fellowship. This research benefited from comments by Tsai-Yen Li and Gerard0 Pardo-Castellote.