Real-time Whole-body Obstacle Avoidance for 7-DOF Redundant Manipulators

Mainly because of the heavy computational costs, the real-time whole-body obstacle avoidance for the redundant manipulators has not been well implemented. This paper presents an approach that can ensure that the whole-body of a redundant manipulator can avoid moving obstacles in real-time during the execution of a task. The manipulator is divided into end-effector and non-end-effector portion. Based on dynamical systems (DS), the real-time end-effector obstacle avoidance is obtained. Besides, the end-effector can reach the given target. By using null-space velocity control, the real-time non-end-effector obstacle avoidance is achieved. Finally, a controller is designed to ensure the whole-body obstacle avoidance. We validate the effectiveness of the method in the simulations and experiments on the 7-DOF arm of the UBTECH humanoid robot.