Effective target tracking and collision avoidance schemes are essential to the success of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) missions. In a dynamic environment, UAV path planning often relies on predicted obstacle and target motion. This paper presents an algorithm that predicts the trajectory of a moving object (target or obstacle) detected by a UAV. An extended Kalman filter is first employed to e...

The planning of the motion of robots has become increasingly more complex as robots are used in a wide spectrum of applications, from extremely repetitive tasks in assembly lines to assistance in delicate surgical procedures (Tombropoulos et al., 1999; Coste-Maniere et al., 2003). Whichever scenario, the planning has to consider the fact that the robot will be interacting with other elements in...

Needle insertion for percutaneous therapies is formulated as a trajectory planning and control problem. A new concept of needle steering is developed and a Needle Manipulation Jacobian is defined using numerical needle insertion models that include needle deflection and soft tissue deformation. This concept is used in conjunction with a potentialfield-based path planning technique to demonstrat...

Mobile robots often find themselves in a situation where they must find a trajectory to another position in their environment, subject to constraints posed by obstacles and the capabilities of the robot itself. This is the problem of planning a path through a continuous domain, for which several approaches have been developed. Each has some limitations however, including requiring state discret...

This paper presents improvements in contact-before-motion planning for humanoid robots that enables to find a path in very constrained environments. Starting from our previous work, the main novelties are to use a rough trajectory to drive the search and as a criterion to find new contacts and generate the best nodes first. This way only few nodes are effectively explored, speeding up the plann...

Motion planning is one of the important tasks in intelligent control of an autonomous mobile robot. Path planning is to generate a collision free path in an environment with obstacles with respect to some criterion. Trajectory planning is to schedule the movement of a mobile robot along the planned path. Several approaches have been proposed to address the problem of motion planning of a mobile...

This paper presents a new method of trajectory planning in rehabilitation robotics. First were measured in healthy subject the pick to place trajectories while haptic robot is in zero impedance space. B-spline approximation is used to mathematically define the measured paths. This trajectory path serves as a central line for the rounding haptic tunnel. In addition to radial elastic and damping ...

Direct methods for trajectory optimization are widely used for planning locally optimal trajectories of robotic systems. Most state-of-the-art techniques treat the discontinuous dynamics of contact as discrete modes and restrict the search for a complete path to a specified sequence through these modes. Here we present a novel method for trajectory planning through contact that eliminates the r...

We present a new preoperative planning method for reducing the risk associated with insertion of straight tools in image-guided keyhole neurosurgery. The method quantifies the risks of multiple candidate trajectories and presents them on the outer head surface to assist the neurosurgeon in selecting the safest path. The surgeon can then define and/or revise the trajectory, add a new one using i...

This paper presents a method of path optimization for nonholonomic systems. This method consists in iteratively modifying a given feasible path in order to make a cost related to the path decrease. The paper presents two main applications of this method: the first one is an algorithm that solves the problem of path planning for complex kinematic systems (i. e. trucks with two trailers) in extre...