Alexander Reiter describes optimal path and trajectory planning for serial robots in general, and rigorously treats the challenging application of path tracking for kinematically redundant manipulators therein in particular. This is facilitated by resolving both the path tracking task and the optimal inverse kinematics problem simultaneously. Furthermore, the author presents methods for fast computation of approximate optimal solutions to planning problems with changing parameters. With an optimal solution to a nominal problem, an iterative process based on parametric sensitivities is applied to rapidly obtain an approximate solution.

About the Author:
Dr. Alexander Reiter is a senior scientist at the Institute of Robotics of the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, Austria. His major fields of research are kinematics, dynamics, and trajectory planning for kinematically redundant serial robots as well as real-time methods for solving parametricnon-linear programming problems.