The problem area under study in this thesis is the development and implementation of a robot-motion planning technique to bring the end-effector of an industrial manipulator to a (pre-grasp) rendezvous location with a randomly-moving target in minimum time.

The robot-motion planning technique utilized herein is a hybrid interception scheme. The end-effector is initially controlled via a navigation-based method and subsequently, in the second phase, via a conventional tracking method that takes over control to ensure a smooth grasp. The proposed method is based on the navigation-based interception scheme originally developed by Mehrandezh et al. in [3]. In this thesis, however, these motion-planning algorithms were modified to suit the industrial manipulator available in the Computer Integrated Manufacturing Laboratory.

The computer-simulation and experimental results demonstrated the capability of the proposed IPNG-based interception scheme to intercept slow- and fast-maneuvering targets faster than a pure tracking method would do.