Multi-objective dynamic optimal trajectory planning of robot manipulators in the presence of obstacles

In this paper, a real-world test problem is presented and made available for the use of evolutionary multi-objective community. The generation of manipulator trajectories by considering multiple objectives and obstacle avoidance is a non-trivial optimisation problem. In this paper two multi-objective evolutionary algorithms viz., elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) and multi-objective differential evolution (MODE) algorithm are proposed to address this problem. Multiple criteria are optimised to two simultaneous objectives. Simulations results are presented for industrial robots with two degrees of freedom (Cartesian robot (PP) with two prismatic joints) and six degrees of freedom (PUMA 560 robot), by considering two objectives optimisation. Two methods (normalized weighting objective functions and average fuzzy membership function) are used to select the best optimal solution from Pareto optimal fronts. Two multi-objective performance measures namely solution spread measure and ratio of non-dominated individuals are used to evaluate the strength of Pareto optimal fronts. Two more multi-objective performance measures namely optimiser overhead and algorithm effort are used to find computational effort of NSGA-II and MODE algorithms. The Pareto optimal fronts and results obtained from various techniques are compared and analysed.