Efficient Feasibility Checking on Continuous Coverage Motion for Constrained Manipulation

Many industrial robotic applications require a manipulator to move the end-effector in a constrained motion to cover a surface region, including painting, spray coating, abrasive blasting, polishing, shotcreting. etc. The manipulator has to satisfy both task constraints imposed on the end-effector (such as maintaining certain distance and angle with respect to the target surface while traversing it) and manipulator joint constraints. Given a robot manipulator and a target surface patch, an important question is whether there exists a feasible path for the manipulator to move continuously along the surface patch to cover it entirely while satisfying both manipulator and task constraints. This question is largely open as it has not been addressed systematically, even though there is substantial literature on path planning of constrained manipulation motion. In this paper, we introduce a general and efficient method to provide answers to this question.