An efficient motion generation method for redundant humanoid robot arms based on motion continuity

This paper proposes a novel method of motion generation for redundant humanoid robot arms, which can efficiently generate continuous collision-free arm motion for the preplanned hand trajectory. The proposed method generates the whole arm motion first and then computes the actuators’ motion, which is different from IK (inverse kinematics)-based motion generation methods. Based on the geometric constraints of the preplanned trajectory and the geometric structure of humanoid robot arms, the wrist trajectory and elbow trajectory can be got first without solving inverse kinematics and forward kinematics. Meanwhile, the constraints restrict all feasible arm configurations to an elbow-circle and reduce the arm configuration space to a two-dimension space. By combining the configuration space and collision distribution of arm motion, collision-free arm configurations can be identified and be used to generate collision-free arm motion, which can avoid unnecessary forward and inverse kinematics. The experiments show that the proposed method can generate continuous and collision-free arm motion for preplanned hand trajectories.