Planning Cuts for Mobile Robots with Bladed Tools

Abstract

Linear bladed cutting tools, such as jigsaws and reciprocating saws are vital manufacturing tools for humans. They enable people to cut structures that are much larger than themselves. Robots currently lack a generic path planner for linear bladed cutting tools. We developed a model for bladed tools based on Reeds-Shepp cars, and used the model to make a generic path planning algorithm for closed curves. We built an autonomous mobile robot which can implement the algorithm to cut arbitrarily large shapes in a 2D plane. We tested the robots performance and demonstrated the algorithm on several test cases.