Direct Search Based Strategy for Obstacle Avoidance of a Redundant Manipulator

This paper presents an iterative direct search based strategy for redundancy resolution. The end-effector of the redundant manipulatorachieves the imposed task of following the contour of a curve, whilefulfilling two other performance criteria: obstacle avoidance and minimization of the sum of joint displacements. The objective function to minimize is the sum of joint displacements, while the obstacle avoidance and end-effector task are expressed as non-linear constraints. The proposed direct search based strategy is iterative; the joint configuration computed in the previous step represents the current point around which the generalized pattern search algorithm is successfully performed.