Path Planning among Movable Obstacles: A Probabilistically Complete Approach

In this paper we study the problem of path planning among movable obstacles, in which a robot is allowed to move the obstacles if they block the robot’s way from a start to a goal position. We make the observation that we can decouple the computations of the robot motions and the obstacle movements, and present a probabilistically complete algorithm, something which to date has not been achieved for this problem. Our algorithm maintains an explicit representation of the robot’s configuration space. We present an efficient implementation for the case of planar, axis-aligned environments and report experimental results on challenging scenarios.

[1]  Yong K. Hwang,et al.  Practical path planning among movable obstacles , 1991, Proceedings. 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  Rachid Alami,et al.  Two manipulation planning algorithms , 1995 .

[3]  Tamim Asfour,et al.  Manipulation Planning Among Movable Obstacles , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  James J. Kuffner,et al.  Navigation among movable obstacles: real-time reasoning in complex environments , 2004, 4th IEEE/RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2004..

[5]  Erik D. Demaine,et al.  PushPush and Push-1 are NP-hard in 2D , 2000, CCCG.

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

[7]  Steven M. LaValle,et al.  Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees: Progress and Prospects , 2000 .

[8]  Thierry Siméon,et al.  Manipulation Planning with Probabilistic Roadmaps , 2004, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[9]  Gordon T. Wilfong,et al.  Motion planning in the presence of movable obstacles , 1988, SCG '88.

[10]  James J. Kuffner,et al.  Planning Among Movable Obstacles with Artificial Constraints , 2008, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[11]  Mark H. Overmars,et al.  Coordinated path planning for multiple robots , 1998, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[12]  Ehud Rivlin,et al.  Practical pushing planning for rearrangement tasks , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[13]  Mark H. Overmars,et al.  An Effective Framework for Path Planning Amidst Movable Obstacles , 2006, WAFR.

[14]  Mahmoud Elgamal.  Heuristic Motion Planning with Movable Obstacles , 2002, Egypt. Comput. Sci. J..

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

[16]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  Randomized Kinodynamic Motion Planning with Moving Obstacles , 2002, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[17]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  Using a PRM planner to compare centralized and decoupled planning for multi-robot systems , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).