Point‐to‐point and multi‐goal path planning for industrial robots

Abstract

AbstractThis article presents contributions in the field of path planning for industrial robots with 6 degrees of freedom. This work presents the results of our research in the last 4 years at the Institute for Process Control and Robotics at the University of Karlsruhe. The path planning approach we present works in an implicit and discretized C‐space. Collisions are detected in the Cartesian workspace by a hierarchical distance computation. The method is based on the A* search algorithm and needs no essential off‐line computation. A new optimal discretization method leads to smaller search spaces, thus speeding up the planning. For a further acceleration, the search was parallelized. With a static load distribution good speedups can be achieved. By extending the algorithm to a bidirectional search, the planner is able to automatically select the easier search direction. The new dynamic switching of start and goal leads finally to the multi‐goal path planning, which is able to compute a collision‐free path between a set of goal poses (e.g., spot welding points) while minimizing the total path length. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.