An evolutionary and local search algorithm for motion planning of two manipulators

A method for obtaining coordinated motion plans of robot manipulators is presented. A decoupled planning approach has been used; that is, the problem has been decomposed into two subproblems: path planning, where a collision‐free path is found for each robot independently only considering fixed obstacles, and trajectory planning, where the paths are timed and synchronized to avoid collisions with other robots. This article focuses on the second problem. The proposed plan can easily be implemented by programs written in most industrial robot programming languages. The generated programs minimize the total motion time of the robots along their paths. The method does not require accurate dynamic models of the robots and uses an evolutionary algorithm followed by a local search which produces near optimal solutions with a relatively small computational cost. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.