Development of a Heuristic Application-Specific Path Planner for Piping Construction

This paper presents the development of a Heuristic application-Specific path planner (HASPP) that can be used to automatically plan trajectories for a manipulator operating around obstacles. Since the implementation of HASPP is inherently application-specific, the application of HASPP to an eight degree of freedom pipe manipulator is presented as an illustrate example. HASPP uses extensive knowledge of the manipulator’s workspace and makes certain assumptions about the environment in finding trajectories. The algorithm also makes use of thee manipulator’s redundant degrees of freedom to avoid obstacles and joint limits during the trajectory while obtaining a heuristic near-optimal solution. The algorithm is rule-based, governed by Heuristics and well-defined geometric tests, providing extremely fast results. It finds “good” trajectories that are optimal within the defined heuristics. When a trajectory is not feasible for the given geometry, the algorithm offers a diagnosis.