A Simple Motion Planning Algorithm for General Robot Manipulators

Abstract

This paper presents a simple and efficient algorithm, using configuration space, to plan collision-free motions for general manipulators. We describe an implementation of the algorithm for manipulators made up of revolute joints. The configuration-space obstacles for an n degree-of-freedom manipulator are approximated by sets of n-1 dimensional slices, recursively built up from one dimensional slices. This obstacle representation leads to an efficient approximation of the free space outside of the configuration-space obstacles.