Planning manipulation movements of a dual-arm system considering obstacle removing

•The paper proposes a motion planner that we call PRM with obstacles (PRMwO).•The PRMwO searches for robot paths and simultaneously determines, if necessary, the obstacles to be removed.•The approach uses a precedence graph to look for a proper sequence of actions and for the distribution of tasks among the robot arms.•The approach has been implemented for a real dual arm system but it is valid for more than two arms.

The paper deals with the problem of planning movements of two hand–arm robotic systems, considering the possibility of using the robot hands to remove potential obstacles in order to obtain a free access to grasp a desired object. The approach is based on a variation of a Probabilistic Road Map that does not rule out the samples implying collisions with removable objects but instead classifies them according to the collided obstacle(s), and allows the search of free paths with the indication of which objects must be removed from the work-space to make the path actually valid; we call it Probabilistic Road Map with Obstacles (PRMwO). The proposed system includes a task assignment system that distributes the task among the robots, using for that purpose a precedence graph built from the results of the PRMwO. The approach has been implemented for a real dual-arm robotic system, and some simulated and real running examples are presented in the paper.