Y.A.R.M – YARM’s Another Random Motion planner: Enabling Multiple Mobile Robots to Remove Debris in Industrial Environments

Abstract

Waste Management is essential to the Manufacturing Industry, and debris is a side product of many different kinds of manufacturing processes. Nowadays, mobile robots, and stationary manipulators, with multiple degrees of freedom, are increasingly used to carry out a variety of complex tasks. In such systems, the manipulators carrying out machining tasks may encounter a variety of obstructions in their machining paths, such as human hands, debris, or other robots. Debris is currently cleaned up manually by humans, before or after a machining process is complete. This may pose risk to humans at times, or affect the manufacturing process itself. To tackle this problem, this thesis proposes a novel random path planning algorithm, YARM, to generate paths for mobile robots, to reach the debris affecting the manipulator. The thesis describes the algorithm, the framework built to run it, and discusses its performance, pertaining to successful collision avoidance and planned paths, in experiments conducted on a simulated system consisting of a manipulator, mobile robots and debris.