We have presented an overview of trajectory planning and optimization methods, with a special emphasis on those relevant to industrial robotic manipulators. It appears from this overview that very efficient methods exist for planning high-quality trajectories when the environment (consisting of the robot, the obstacles, etc.) is well defined and static. A typical work flow, may integrate some of these methods as sketched in Fig. 5. The main current challenge of trajectory planning in classical factory automation lies mainly in the development of robust software, as well as practical integration into the work place.
The next major step in factory automation is to integrate the robot more tightly with human operators. For this, new methods must be developed, taking into account environments that are by nature time changing, and sometimes in an unpredictable way, because of the close, possibly physical interaction with human operators. In this context, other types of constraints and optimization objectives must also be considered, such as safety or compliance.

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