Dealing with Geometric Complexity in Motion Planning

We consider the issues involved in writing path planners that can work well with complex geometric models of robots and workspaces, and outline our work in implementing a solution. We claim that many path planning problems can be solved by a mixture of global and local planning. In turn, local planning can be usefully supported by the provision of efficient distance computations. Global planning requires more domain-dependent techniques, but we have been experimenting with approximations to the Generalised Voronoi Diagram for compactness of representation, and the use of rule-based systems to encode tactical knowledge. Results are shown using a two path planning frameworks; one for industrial vehicles, and one for manipulators.