AN APPROACH TO ON-LINE PATH PLANNING FOR MULTIPLE ROBOTS - American Control Conference, Proceedings of the 1995

This paper presents an approach to on-line path planning for multiple robots in configuration space. On the basis of defining some points in workspace as fmdamental obstacles, we develop an efficient algorithm for mapping a complex Cartesian obstacle by selecting obstacle's critical points. Its computational time for mapping a two-dimensional obstacle is approximately 5ms with a 33Mhz 80486 CPU. To plan 3 collision-free path for a master robot, we use slice configuration space obstacles for building a free subspace. To plan a collision-free path for a slave robot, swept volumes of the master robot are taken as additional moving obstacles into consideration. Finally, we report graphical simulation results with respect to two PUMA robots sharing a common workspace.