  Mainly because of the heavy computational costs, the real-time whole-body
obstacle avoidance for the redundant manipulators has not been well
implemented. This paper presents an approach that can ensure that the
whole-body of a redundant manipulator can avoid moving obstacles in real-time
during the execution of a task. The manipulator is divided into end-effector
and non-end-effector portion. Based on dynamical systems (DS), the real-time
end-effector obstacle avoidance is obtained. Besides, the end-effector can
reach the given target. By using null-space velocity control, the real-time
non-endeffector obstacle avoidance is achieved. Finally, a controller is
designed to ensure the whole-body obstacle avoidance. We validate the
effectiveness of the method in the simulations and experiments on the 7-DOF arm
of the UBTECH humanoid robot.
