Abstract-This paper presents the software tool used at the Institute of Industrial and Control Engineering (IOC-UPC) for teaching and research in robot motion planning. The tool allows to cope with problems with one or more robots, being a generic robot defined as a kinematic tree with a mobile base, i.e. the tool can plan and simulate from simple two degrees of freedom free-flying robots to multi-robot scenarios with mobile manipulators equipped with anthropomorphic hands. The main core of planners is provided by the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL). Different basic planners can be flexibly used and parameterized, allowing students to gain insight into the different planning algorithms. Among the advanced features the tool allows to easily define the coupling between degrees of freedom, the dynamic simulation and the integration with task planers. It is principally being used in the research of motion planning strategies for hand-arm robotic systems.

The paper deals with the problem of planning movements of dual-arm anthropomorphic systems, with the aim of reducing the computational cost of the problem and making the movements look as human-like as possible. The key idea of the proposal is the search of synergies of the dual-arm anthropomorphic system in order to use them to reduce the dimension of the search space while preserving human-like appearance. This idea was already developed and successfully used to plan movements of robotic hands, thus the extension to a dual-arm system is attractive. The paper presents a description of the proposed approach as well as real experimental results that encourage doing further research in this line.Postprint (author's final draft

Abstract-The paper presents a planning procedure that allows an anthropomorphic dual-arm robotic system to perform a manipulation task in a natural human-like way by using demonstrated human movements. The key idea of the proposal is to convert the demonstrated trajectories into attractive potential fields defined over the configuration space and then use an RRT * -based planning algorithm that minimizes a path-cost function designed to bias the tree growth towards the human-demonstrated configurations. The paper presents a description of the proposed approach as well as results from a conceptual and a real application example, the latter using a real anthropomorphic dual-arm robotic system. A path-quality measure, based on first-order synergies (correlations between joint velocities) obtained from real human movements, is also proposed and used for evaluation and comparison purposes. The obtained results show that the paths obtained with the proposed procedure are more human-like.

Abstract-The paper deals with the problem of motion planning for anthropomorphic dual-arm robots. It introduces a measure of the similarity of the movements needed to solve two given tasks. Planning using this measure to select proper arm synergies for a given task improves the planning performance and the resulting plan.

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