language: en

A Combinatorial Approach to Trajectory Planning for Binary Manipulators

David S. Lees Gregory S. Chirikjian
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore, MD 21218

Abstract Binary manipulators are powered by actuators which have only two stable states. Therefore, they can reach only a discrete (but possibly large) number of locations. Compared to a manipulator built with continuous actuators, a binary manipulator provides reasonable performance, and is relatively inexpensive (up to an order of magnitude cheaper). The number of states of a binary manipulator grows exponentially with the number of actuators. This makes the calculation of its inverse kinematics quite difficult. This paper presents a combinatorial method for computing the inverse kinematics of a binary manipulator that reduces the search space to a manageable size. It also creates extremely smooth motions that follow a specified trajectory very accurately (in both position and orientation), despite the discrete nature of binary actuation.

1 Introduction