Delft University of Technology
Faculty Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering Transport Technology / Logistic Engineering
P.A. Strik Motion planning; a survey of approaches.
Literature survey, Report 94.3.LT.4282, Transport Technology, Logistic Engineering.
Motion planning is planning the motion of an object through an environment filled with obstacies. An important application is motion-planning of a robot. Borsje [Report 93.3.LT.4193] describes a motion planning problem incorporated in a production planning problem. The motion planning problem has to be solved by the production-planning program in order to determine whether or not a part can be transported to its next destination in the production area.
A motion-planning problem is defined by the constraints imposed on the motion. These constraints can be geometric constraints, kinematic constraints and/or dynamic constraints. A classification of motion-planning problems is given.
The find-path problem is the most fundamental motion-planning problem. lt is the problem of finding a collision-free path for an object through an environment containing stationary obstacles whose shapes and configurations are known in advance. The only constraint is collision avoidance. Complete algorithms solving a find-path problem of any dimensionality exist, but suffer from extremely high complexity.
For high dimensional problems, only approximating algorithms are of practical interest. These algorithms require many computations. Recently, the application of parallel programming has made it possible to run these algorithms in a reasonabie time.
For the case of two degrees of freedom the choice of both complete and approximating algorithms is much richer. These methods are also applied to higher dimensional problems. In this case the problem has to be reduced to a two-dimensional problem first. Particularly elimination of rotational degrees of freedom makes a probiem much easier to solve.
Reports on Logistic Engineering (in Dutch)
