How Do Robot Manipulators Move? - Robotic Sea Bass

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. In my undergraduate motion planning course, we learned how to make a point robot navigate a map using several motion planning algorithms — you may have encountered A*, PRM, RRT, and so on. However, when I first started working on problems with robot arms (or manipulators), I felt there was a lot missing to go from these simple 2D navigation examples to more complex manipulators. At the time of writing, I count 7 years since I found myself in this situation. Since then, I’ve done a lot of learning, trying, messing up, and correcting. I’ve written blogs and videos for MATLAB and Simulink [1][2][3], created videos for RoboCup@Home Education, developed an academic service robot software stack, became a MoveIt maintainer, and recently created PyRoboPlan, an educational toolbox for robot manipulation written in Python. While my main focus in robotics remains high-level behavior and task planning, I would say motion planning for manipulators is a clos

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. In my undergraduate motion planning course, we learned how to make a point robot navigate a map using several motion planning algorithms — you may have encountered A*, PRM, RRT, and so on. However, when I first started working on problems with robot arms (or manipulators), I felt there was a lot missing to go from these simple 2D navigation examples to more complex manipulators. At the time of writing, I count 7 years since I found myself in this situation. Since then, I’ve done a lot of learning, trying, messing up, and correcting. I’ve written blogs