Trajectory Planning

Higher orders and blends

 Quintic Polynomial Trajectory
• Cubics allow us to define the position and velocity at
each location in the trajectory. However, the
acceleration is discontinuous.
• If we also want to specify the acceleration we would
need a Quintic or order 5 polynomial.
  t   a0  a1t  a2t 2  a3t 3  a4t 4  a5t 5
• Use the initial and final positions, velocities and
accelerations as our boundary conditions to solve for
the coefficients.
Quintic Polynomial Trajectory

  t   a0  a1t  a2t 2  a3t 3  a4t 4  a5t 5

 Quintic Polynomial Trajectory

• Compute inverse for each joint

 Pick and Place Operations
J o in t i
F in a l
q (tf)
q (t2 )

• Path Profile Set down

q (t1 )
L ift - o ff
I n itia l
q (t0 )

t0 t1 t2 tf T im e
Speed

• Velocity Profile
t0 t1 t2 tf T im e
A c c e le r a t io n

• Acceleration Profile t0 t1 t2 t f T im e
Linear function with parabolic blends
Another choice of path shape is linear.

That is, we simply interpolate linearly to move from the present

joint position to the final position, as in Fig.1

FIGURE 1: Linear interpolation requiring infinite acceleration

However, straightforward linear
interpolation would cause the
velocity to be discontinuous at the
beginning and end of the motion.

To create a smooth path with

continuous position and velocity,
we start with the linear function but
add a parabolic blend region at
each path point.

During the blend portion of the

trajectory, constant acceleration is
used to change velocity smoothly
In order to construct this single segment, we will assume that
the parabolic blends both have the same duration; therefore,
the same constant acceleration (modulo a sign) is used during
both blends.

As indicated in Fig. 2, there are many solutions to the problem—

but note that the answer is always symmetric about the halfway
point in time, th, and about the halfway point in position,ϴh.

FIGURE 2: Linear segment with parabolic blends.

The velocity at the end of the blend region must equal
the velocity of the linear section, and so we have

(7.19)

(7.20)
Combining the above two equations and t = 2th, we get

(7.21)
The constraint on the acceleration used in the blend is
Linear function with parabolic blends for a path with via points
We now consider linear paths with parabolic blends for the case in
which there are an arbitrary number of via points specified.

FIGURE 7.9: Multi segment linear path with blends

We will use the following notation:
Consider three neighboring path points, which we will call points j,
k, and l.

The duration of the blend region at path point k is tk.

The duration of the linear portion between points j and k is tjk.
The overall duration of the segment connecting points j and k is
tdjk.

 The velocity during the linear portion is ‘JK

and
the acceleration during the blend at point
j is ‘’JK
 As with the single-segment case, there are many possible
solutions, depending on the value of acceleration used at each
blend. Given all the path points ‘k the desired durations tdjk, and
the magnitude of acceleration to use at each path point .
we can compute the blend times tk. For interior path points, this
follows simply from the equations

(7.24)
The first and last segments must be handled slightly differently,
because an entire blend region at one end of the segment must be
counted in the total segment's time duration.

For the first segment, we solve for t1 by equating two expressions

for the velocity during the linear phase of the segment:

(7.25)

 This
can be solved for t1, the
blend time at the initial
point; then and t12 are easily
computed: (7.26)
Likewise, for the last segment (the one connecting points n —1 and n),
we have

which leads to the solution

The trajectory of a particular joint is specified as follows: Path
points in degrees: 10, 35, 25, 10. The duration of these three
segments should be 2, 1, 3 seconds, respectively. The magnitude
of the default acceleration to use at all blend points is 50
degrees/second2. Calculate all segment velocities, blend times,
and linear times.
SOLUTION