RUL-Aware RRT*: Degradation-Balanced Motion Planning for Robotic Manipulators

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Robotic manipulators operating over long durations often experience uneven joint degradation, which causes the weakest actuator to fail prematurely, leads to unplanned downtime, and results in significant operational losses. Traditional motion-planning algorithms do not account for joint health conditions and therefore tend to exacerbate this imbalance during extended operation. To address this challenge, this study introduces the RUL-aware RRT*, a motion-planning method that incorporates joint remaining useful life information into the planning process and adaptively adjusts joint usage in response to evolving health conditions. The method is evaluated across three representative scenarios, namely the Full Health Scenario (FHS), the Heterogeneous Degradation Scenario (HDS), and the Local Degradation Scenario (LDS). The results show that the RUL-aware RRT* effectively suppresses degradation imbalance, delays the emergence of bottleneck failures, and improves the long-term reliability of the robotic system during extended operation. These findings demonstrate that integrating health feedback into motion planning provides a practical and robust pathway for enhancing the durability and operational resilience of manipulators subject to continuous wear.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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