ROS Based Obstacle Avoidance Motion Planning of UR5 Manipulator

Abstract

The main work of the paper focuses on kinematic analysis modeling and obstacle avoidance motion planning based on a UR5 manipulator. It uses the software package MoveIt to generate various configuration files and startup files required for motion planning on Robot Operating System (ROS) platform. Through plug-ins of Python and Rviz, it accesses MoveIt and generates an obstacle environment. Then, it calls the Open Motion Planning Library to plan the motion of the UR5 manipulator, which is frequently used in both academic and industrial fields. The paper analyzes the widely used Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) algorithm and the improved RRT-connect algorithm by conducting a couple of motion planning experiments in an obstacle environment. It illustrates the experimental results of two different algorithms and compares their respective performances. Therefore, it sorts out the experiment process and the experimental results to provide ideas for the further improvement of motion planning of UR5 or other manipulators.