Path Planning of Cooperative Construction Manipulators Using Genetic Algorithms

This paper presents the work done to investigate the potential of applying Genetic Algorithms (GA’s) to automate the path planning of cooperative construction manipulators. Though there is potential to achieve economy by using cooperative manipulators, this method is not being commonly adopted in construction sites. A key barrier to the use of cooperative manipulators is the meticulous planning required to ensure feasible and safe operation. The basic premise of this work is that automating the different planning steps will contribute to more reliable plans and thus promote the usage of cooperative manipulator. Two methodologies have been proposed using the concept of Configuration Space (C-Space) technique in conjunction with the genetic search. The implementation details and results of the best methodology is presented and discussed for a test problem involving two cooperative manipulators each of 2 DOF.