Abstract
This paper presents a new control strategy of the artificial potential field approach to a real-time motion planning problem in a known environment. In the artificial potential approach, the goal is represented by an attractive artificial potential and the obstacles are represented by a repulsive one, so that a robot reaches the goal without colliding with obstacles by using a gradient technique such as the steepest descent method. Although this approach is quite simple and computationally much less expensive than other methods based on the global information on the task space, so far few attentions have been paid to dynamic behavior of the generated trajectories such as movement time from the initial position to the goal and the velocity profile of the end-effector motion. In the present paper, we argue that the dynamic behavior of the arm trajectory to be generated should be taken into account within the framework of the artificial potential field approach, and introduce a time base generator that acts as a time varying gain and determines a dynamic behavior of the arm motion. By synchronizing a potential function used in the artificial potential field with the time base generator, convergence time of the generated arm trajectory can be adjusted through the time base generator without any change of the potential function itself.
