Automated Trajectory Planner of Industrial Robot for Pick-and-Place Task

Industrial robots, due to their great speed, precision and cost-effectiveness in repetitive tasks, now tend to be used in place of human workers in automated manufacturing systems. In particular, they perform the pick-and-place operation, a non-value-added activity which at the same time cannot be eliminated. Hence, minimum time is an important consideration for economic reasons in the trajectory planning system of the manipulator. The trajectory should also be smooth to handle parts precisely in applications such as semiconductor manufacturing, processing and handling of chemicals and medicines, and fluid and aerosol deposition. In this paper, an automated trajectory planner is proposed to determine a smooth, minimum-time and collision-free trajectory for the pick-and-place operations of a 6-DOF robotic manipulator in the presence of an obstacle. Subsequently, it also proposes an algorithm for the jerk-bounded Synchronized Trigonometric S-curve Trajectory (STST) and the 'forbidden-sphere' technique to avoid the obstacle. The proposed planner is demonstrated with suitable examples and comparisons. The experiments show that the proposed planner is capable of providing a smoother trajectory than the cubic spline based trajectory.