From Discrete Mission Schedule to Continuous Implicit Trajectory using Optimal Time Warping

Abstract

This paper presents a generic solution to apply a mission described by a sequence of tasks on a robot while accounting for its physical constraints, without computing explicitly a reference trajectory. A naive solution to this problem would be to schedule the execution of the tasks sequentially, avoiding concurrency. This solution does not exploit fully the robot capabilities such as redundancy and have poor performance in terms of execution time or energy. Our contribution is to determine the time-optimal realization of the mission taking into account robotic constraints that may be as complex as collision avoidance. Our approach achieves more than a simple scheduling; its originality lies in maintaining the task approach in the formulated optimization of the task sequencing problem. This theory is exemplified through a complete experiment on the real HRP-2 robot.