Colombo, Matteo (Politecnico di Milano), Morchia, Lorenzo (Politecnico di Milano), Zanchettin, Andrea Maria (Politecnico di Milano), Rocco, Paolo (Politecnico di Milano)

Reactive Trajectory Planning for Robotic Manipulators in Shared Dynamic Workspace

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Robotics for Industry 4.0" (FrBT3), Friday, July 18, 2025, 14:20−14:40, Auditorium

Joint 10th IFAC Symposium on Mechatronic Systems and 14th Symposium on Robotics, July 15-18, 2025, Paris, France

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on August 2, 2025

Abstract

With the rise of collaborative robotics, the ability of a robotic manipulator to plan and adapt to dynamic and changing scenarios is taking on particular importance. Commonly used state-of-the-art motion planners are unable to satisfy such requirements, as they lack the necessary reactiveness. In this paper, we propose the adoption of nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) to generate collision-free trajectories, which are then tracked by a low-level controller. We formulate the trajectory generation as an optimization problem in the NMPC framework, proposing a set of obstacle avoidance constraints that prioritise safety as a primary requirement. The proposed algorithm is integrated with a custom perception pipeline and tested in both simulations and on a real collaborative pick-and-place manipulation task, proving that our algorithm achieves reactive motion planning for robotic arms.