Collision-free kinematics for hyper-redundant manipulators in dynamic scenes using optimal velocity obstacles

Hyper-redundant manipulators have been widely used in the complex and cluttered environment for achieving various kinds of tasks. In this article, we present two contributions. First, we provide a novel algorithm of relating forward and backward reaching inverse kinematic algorithm to velocity obstacles. Our optimization-based algorithm simultaneously handles the task space constraints, the joint limit constraints, and the collision-free constraints for hyper-redundant manipulators based on the generalized framework. Second, we present an extension of our inverse kinematic algorithm to collision avoidance for the hyper-redundant manipulators, where the workspaces may have different types of obstacles. We highlight the performance of our algorithm on hyper-redundant manipulators with various degrees of freedom. The results show that our algorithm has made full use of dexterity of hyper-redundant manipulators in complex environments, enhancing the performance and increasing the flexibility.