Sequential Quadratic Programming based Global Path Re-Planner for a Mobile Manipulator

The mobile manipulator is expected to work in partially defined or unstructured environments. In our global/local approach to path planning, joint trajectories are generated for a desired Cartesian space path, designed by the global path planner. For a local path planner, inverse kinematics for a redundant system is used. Joint displacement limit for the manipulator links is considered in the motion planner. In an event of failure to obtain feasible trajectories, the task cannot be accomplished. At the point of failure, a deviation in the Cartesian space path is obtained and a re-planner gives a new path that would achieve the goal position. To calculate the deviation, a nonlinear optimization problem is formulated and solved by standard Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) method.