Path planning for an omnidirectional mobile manipulator by evolutionary computation

We describe a method for the path planning of an omnidirectional mobile manipulator by applying an evolutionary strategy. For a path using a B-spline, it is important how to choose some appropriate data points and the corresponding end points. The proposed approach automatically selects their points in a wide range, minimizing or maximizing the total cost function, which consists of several sub-cost functions such as motion smoothness, movable range of joint, singular orientation and falling down. The simulation result shows that our method is effective for the path planning of a robot, which has many boundary conditions and complicated evaluation such as the mobile manipulator considered.