Trajectory Planning with Obstacle Avoidance of 3 DoF Robotic Arm for Test Tube Handling System

This paper presents a trajectory planning method with obstacle avoidance strategy of 3 DoF parallel link robotic arm to perform the task of autonomous test tube handling. For implementation in real-world environment such as in the process of material handling within healthcare setting, robotic arm frequently needs to deal with obstacles come up on its way of finishing its task. Hence to maintain a smooth actuation and a safer manipulation point-to-point from a start to a goal position, a method of trajectory planning with obstacle avoidance is required. In this paper, the method of cubic polynomials trajectory generation with distance calculation for obstacle avoidance has been performed. The result of our experiments shows that our proposed method is successfully demonstrated with a high degree of accuracy and precision in our research setup. The average position error of trajectory tracking is not more than 0.43 cm during the experiment with obstacle, and 0.35 cm during the experiment without obstacle.