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A real-time path planning approach without the computation of Cspace obstacles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2004

Yongji Wang
Affiliation:
Laboratory for Internet Technologies, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 8718, Beijing 100080 (China). E-mail: ywang@intec.iscas.ac.cn
Liu Han
Affiliation:
Laboratory for Internet Technologies, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 8718, Beijing 100080 (China). E-mail: liuhan@intec.iscas.ac.cn
Mingshu Li
Affiliation:
Laboratory for Internet Technologies, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 8718, Beijing 100080 (China). E-mail: mingshu@admin.iscas.ac.cn
Qing Wang
Affiliation:
Laboratory for Internet Technologies, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 8718, Beijing 100080 (China). E-mail: wq@intec.iscas.ac.cn
Jinhui Zhou
Affiliation:
Laboratory for Internet Technologies, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 8718, Beijing 100080 (China). E-mail: jinhui@intec.iscas.ac.cn
Matthew Cartmel
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Centre for Systems and Control, James Watt (South) Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ (U.K.). E-mail: m.cartmell@mech.gla.ac.uk

Abstract

An important concept proposed in the early stage of robot path planning field is the shrinking of the robot to a point and meanwhile expanding of the obstacles in the workspace as a set of new obstacles. The resulting grown obstacles are called the Configuration Space (Cspace) obstacles. The find-path problem is then transformed into that of finding a collision free path for a point robot among the Cspace obstacles. However, the research experiences obtained so far have shown that the calculation of the Cspace obstacles is very hard work when the following situations occur: 1. both the robot and obstacles are not polygons and 2. the robot is allowed to rotate. This situation is even worse when the robot and obstacles are three dimensional (3D) objects with various shapes. Obviously a direct path planning approach without the calculation of the Cspace obstacles is strongly needed. This paper presents such a new real-time robot path planning approach which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one in the robotic community. The fundamental ideas are the utilization of inequality and optimization technique. Simulation results have been presented to show its merits.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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