The link and comparison between velocity-level and acceleration-level repetitive motion planning schemes verified via PA10 robot arm

• A novel RMP scheme at the joint-acceleration level is proposed.
• Joint-acceleration limits are incorporated into the acceleration-level RMP scheme.
• Link and comparison between different-level schemes are investigated.
• Simulation results demonstrate the advantage of acceleration-level RMP scheme.

To solve the joint-angle drift problem of redundant robot arms, this paper presents two kinds of repetitive motion planning (RMP) schemes (i.e., the velocity-level RMP scheme and the acceleration-level RMP scheme). Such two kinds of different-level RMP schemes can be reformulated as quadratic programming (QP) problems subject to equality and bound constraints. In addition, since the two kinds of RMP schemes solve the joint-angle drift problem at different levels, the link and comparison between the velocity-level and the acceleration-level RMP schemes are investigated in this paper. In order to compare the two kinds of RMP schemes, PA10 robot arm is tested to perform two different types of path-tracking tasks (i.e., the triangular path and the rhombic path) by employing velocity-level and acceleration-level RMP schemes. Computer-simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the acceleration-level RMP scheme, as compared with the velocity-level RMP scheme.