Random Probing to Approximate Medial Axes and Plan Safe Motion

We propose a novel approach to planning the safe motion of a robot the motion is considered safe if the robot stays as distant as possible from the nearest obstacle The approach is based on approximating the medial axis of the free con guration space through randomized probes of the full con guration space Experiments with and DOF manipulators show that the approach generates longer but signi cantly safer motion when compared with naive planning to simply nds a shortest motion In addition once preprocessing is com plete our approach spends much less time planning motion than the naive one As it is based on probing randomly rather than at points on a grid our approach promises to extend e ectively to robots with many DOF