An opportunistic global path planner

In this paper we describe a robot path-planning algorithm that constructs a global skeleton of free-space by incremental local methods. The curves of the skeleton are the loci of maxima of an artificial potential field that is directly proportional to distance of the robot from obstacles. Our method has the advantage of fast convergence of local methods in uncluttered environments, but it also has a deterministic and efficient method of escaping local extremal points of the potential function. We first describe a general roadmap algorithm, for configuration spaces of any dimension, and then describe specific applications of the algorithm for robots with two and three degrees of freedom.

[1]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators and Mobile Robots , 1986 .

[2]  R. Thom.  Sur L'Homologie des Varietes Algebriques Réelles , 1965 .

[3]  C. Gibson,et al.  Topological Stability of Smooth Mappings , 1976 .

[4]  John H. Reif,et al.  Complexity of the mover's problem and generalizations , 1979, 20th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1979).

[5]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  Robot motion planning with many degrees of freedom and dynamic constraints , 1991 .

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

[7]  Tomás Lozano-Pérez,et al.  An algorithm for planning collision-free paths among polyhedral obstacles , 1979, CACM.

[8]  J. Milnor.  On the Betti numbers of real varieties , 1964 .

[9]  Dinesh Manocha,et al.  Efficient techniques for multipolynomial resultant algorithms , 1991, ISSAC '91.

[10]  John F. Canny,et al.  Generalised Characteristic Polynomials , 1990, J. Symb. Comput..

[11]  John F. Canny,et al.  Computing Roadmaps of General Semi-Algebraic Sets , 1991, Comput. J..

[12]  John F. Canny,et al.  Constructing Roadmaps of Semi-Algebraic Sets I: Completeness , 1988, Artificial Intelligence.

[13]  O. Khatib,et al.  Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators and Mobile Robots , 1985, Proceedings. 1985 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[14]  Ming C. Lin,et al.  A fast algorithm for incremental distance calculation , 1991, Proceedings. 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[15]  John F. Canny,et al.  Generalized Characteristic Polynomials , 1988, ISSAC.

[16]  J. Schwartz,et al.  On the “piano movers” problem. II. General techniques for computing topological properties of real algebraic manifolds , 1983 .