Randomized motion planning on parallel and distributed architectures

Motion planning is a fundamental problem in a number of application areas, including robotics, automation, and virtual reality. This paper describes a parallel implementation of a motion planning algorithm particularly suited for complex systems characterized by many degrees of freedom. The implementation is based on the concurrent exploration of the search space by a randomized planner replicated on each node of the parallel architecture. All processing elements compete to obtain a solution over the entire search space in an OR-parallel fashion. Reported results refer to a low-cost cluster of PCs and an SGI Onyx2 parallel machine. The experiments emphasise the effectiveness of the approach for complex, high-dimensionality planning problems, We believe that the approach may be useful in other complex search problems, especially when the parallel architecture exhibits relatively high communication latency.

[1]  B. Faverjon,et al.  Probabilistic Roadmaps for Path Planning in High-Dimensional Con(cid:12)guration Spaces , 1996 .

[2]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  Robot motion planning , 1970, The Kluwer international series in engineering and computer science.

[3]  Narendra Ahuja,et al.  Gross motion planning—a survey , 1992, CSUR.

[4]  Lydia E. Kavraki,et al.  On finding narrow passages with probabilistic roadmap planners , 1998 .

[5]  Francesco Zanichelli,et al.  A real-time library for the design of hybrid robot control architectures , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Innovations in Theory, Practice and Applications (Cat. No.98CH36190).

[6]  Dominik Henrich,et al.  Fast Motion Planning by Parallel Processing – a Review , 1997, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[7]  Lydia E. Kavraki,et al.  Probabilistic roadmaps for path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces , 1996, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[8]  Rajeev Motwani,et al.  Path planning in expansive configuration spaces , 1997, Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[9]  Vipin Kumar,et al.  A parallel formulation of informed randomized search for robot motion planning problems , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Vipin Kumar,et al.  Parallel search algorithms for robot motion planning , 1993, [1993] Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[11]  John Canny,et al.  The complexity of robot motion planning , 1988 .

[12]  Dharma P. Agrawal,et al.  A Randomized Parallel Backtracking Algorithm , 1988, IEEE Trans. Computers.

[13]  Dominik Henrich,et al.  Randomized Parallel Motion Planning for Robot Manipulators , 1996 .

[14]  Wolfgang Ertel,et al.  Performance analysis of competitive OR-parallel theorem proving , 1991, Forschungsberichte, TU Munich.

[15]  Angel P. del Pobil,et al.  Practical Motion Planning in Robotics: Current Approaches and Future Directions , 1998 .

[16]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  Robot Motion Planning: A Distributed Representation Approach , 1991, Int. J. Robotics Res..