I am working on a 6 DOF robot arm for surgical operation. The endeffector is a cutting tool. The requirement is that the endeffector of the arm should follow a path defined by series of waypoints and the trajectory exection should be smooth and continuous.

Steps done so far:

• Using ros-moveit-indigo installed in ubuntu 14.04.
• Configured moveitsetupassistant for the arm
• Tested various start and goal positions with different planners to chose the best planner out of it.
• Now finalised the planner as trac_ik
• Next, I Installed cartesian path planner plugin.
• Using the interactive markers, defined series of points for the arm to follow.
• Tried to tune the parameters of the cartesian path planner and have set the step size to be minimum 0.001 and allow replanning is enabled and planning time is set to maximum.

Result:

The planner couldn't able execute the path completely and failed most of the times showing only less than 20% of path able to execute. But all the points defined are valid.

Question:

How to make the cartesian path planner execute the trajectory completely?

Is cartesian path planner is the only way to define and execute a smooth trajectory?

What are the other options to define a smooth trajectory for the arm?