Environment-aware motion planning for EAST Optical Diagnostic Beam Orientation Robot.

EAST Optical Diagnostic Beam Orientation Robot (EODBOR) is designed for the calibration of the visible optical diagnostic system before the plasma experiment, which can orientate light beams with high precision. At present, the motion of EODBOR is purely controlled by the operators during the whole calibration process since planning algorithms based on prior knowledge of the environment cannot be adopted due to the intrinsically unstructured property of EAST's vacuum vessel. To automate the calibration, we upgraded our previous system and propose a method for environment-aware motion planning based on Robot Operating System (ROS). In this method, the probabilistic octree is used to represent unknown objects in the environment, which is updated with point clouds from an RGB-D camera mounted at the end of the manipulator. We verify the feasibility and stability of the proposed method through simulations and experiments. • An environment-aware motion planning system based on Robot Operating System (ROS) is developed. • A hand–eye calibration method for RGB-D cameras using a calibration sphere is proposed. • Simulations are carried out in a virtual scene based on the real size of the vacuum vessel of EAST and the installation position of the robotic arm. • Experiments using an eye-in-hand system consisting of a UR5 robotic arm and a RealSense D435 validate the feasibility of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]