A gradient-based path optimization method for motion planning

Most algorithms in probabilistic sampling-based path planning compute collision-free paths made of straight line segments lying in the configuration space. Due to the randomness of sampling, the paths make detours that need to be optimized. The contribution of this paper is to propose a basic gradient-based (GB) algorithm that transforms a polygonal collision-free path into a shorter one. While requiring only collision checking, and not any time-consuming obstacle distance computation nor geometry simplification, we constrain only part of the configuration variables that may cause a collision, and not entire configurations. Thus parasite motions that are not useful for the problem resolution are reduced without any assumption. Experimental results include navigation and manipulation tasks, e.g. a manipulator arm filling boxes and a PR2 robot working in a kitchen environment. Comparisons with a random shortcut optimizer and a partial shortcut have also been studied. keywords: path optimization; motion planning; robotics