Planning handling operations in changing industrial plants

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of planning collision-free motions for a fleet of mobile robots moving in a cluttered and changing workspace. We focus on the problem of planning handling operations in an industrial plant: find a collision-free trajectory for a set of mobile robots for handling a group of movable objects in a cluttered industrial plant. The motion planner we describe copes with constraints due to changing of the workspace by decomposing the planning problem into 2 stages: (1) building a single roadmap by pre-processing the C-space of the moving systems, and (2) planning coordinated collision-free paths for these systems including manipulation of the roadmap to guarantee the incorporation of the workspace changing. The planner has been implemented and demonstrated on 2D models of industrial plants.