Trajectory planning for cooperative multiple manipulators with passive joints

This paper proposes an algorithm to determine sub-optimal paths and trajectories for cooperative multiple manipulators with passive joints. The problem of operating and transferring the object from a given start point to a given goal point is considered. In this case, in general, degrees of freedom of the manipulators are larger than that of the object. Therefore this manipulator system involves redundancy. It does not make big effect for the mobility of the object not to consider several degrees of freedom. So several joints can be changed to passive ones. We use remaining redundant degrees of freedom to refine trajectories. We apply this algorithm to a two-manipulators system. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the algorithm.