Obstacle Avoidance for Kinematically Redundant Robot*, **

Manipulator's obstacle avoidance is always a challenging topic in robotics. With the concern of the safety problems in human working environment, an improved obstacle avoidance method is proposed based on the general solution of the inverse kinematic problem of a redundant manipulator. A new obstacle detection method using Kinect R sensor is designed to give a robust obstacle information. By designing a parallel system of the manipulator, the proposed control method is not only to achieve the goal of moving away from the obstacle, but also able to guarantee the robot move back to its original pose. The stability of the closed-loop system is established using Lyapunov direct method to ensure the asymptotic stability of the system. The performance of the simulation results verifies the effectiveness of the proposed obstacle detection algorithm and the obstacle avoidance method.