Motion Planning for a Class of Planar Closed-Chain Manipulators

Guanfeng Liu
CS. Dept. Stanford University

Abstract:

We study the motion problem for planar star-shaped manipulators.
These manipulators are formed by joining k ``legs" to a common point
(like the thorax of an insect) and then fixing the ``feet" to the
ground.

The result is a planar parallel manipulator with k-1 independent
closed loops.

A topological analysis is used to understand the global structure of
the configuration space so that planning problem can be solved
exactly.

The worst-case complexity of our algorithm is  O(k^3+k^2N^3), where
$N$ is the maximum number of links in a leg.
Examples illustrating our method are given.