Two Robot Arm Cooperative Path Planning Using String Stretching

Abstract

Abstract Two arm robot path planning has many applications. Potential uses of 2 arm robot path planning include terrestrial and space based construction, and general movement of objects. The U.S. space station will most likely be built using robots so that humans do not have to be put into space regularly at great expense and risk. Control of robots from Earth via telerobotics is not practical because the robots will be so far away that there is a delay in the signals due to the great distance between the robots and the controllers and the fact that the signals are limited by the speed of light. The robot arms could also be controlled remotely from space, but only one at a time could be controlled and thus many people would need to be sent up to control all of the robots. One pair of robot arms can replace one human to manually build a structure. However, there would not be any savings in the number of humans sent into space because each pair of robot arms would require a human operator in space. Thus the robot arms should be autonomous or at least semi-autonomous to reduce the number of humans required in space for construction of the space station.