Motion Planning in Irreducible Path Spaces

Andreas Orthey (1) , Olivier Roussel (2) , Olivier Stasse (2) , Michel Taïx (2)

1 CNRS-AIST JRL - Joint Robotics Laboratory
2 LAAS-GEPETTO - Équipe Mouvement des Systèmes Anthropomorphes

The motion of a mechanical system can be defined as a path through its configuration space. Computing such a path has a computational complexity scaling exponentially with the dimensionality of the configuration space. We propose to reduce the dimensionality of the configuration space by introducing the irreducible path --- a path having a minimal swept volume. The paper consists of three parts: In part I, we define the space of all irreducible paths and show that planning a path in the irreducible path space preserves completeness of any motion planning algorithm. In part II, we construct an approximation to the irreducible path space of a serial kinematic chain under certain assumptions. In part III, we conduct motion planning using the irreducible path space for a mechanical snake in a turbine environment, for a mechanical octopus with eight arms in a pipe system and for the sideways motion of a humanoid robot moving through a room with doors and through a hole in a wall. We demonstrate that the concept of an irreducible path can be applied to any motion planning algorithm taking curvature constraints into account.

Mots clés: Motion Planning; Serial Kinematic Chain; Swept Volume * Corresponding author; Irreducible Paths

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Andreas Orthey, Olivier Roussel, Olivier Stasse, Michel Taïx. Motion Planning in Irreducible Path Spaces. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2018, 109, pp.97-108. ⟨10.1016/j.robot.2018.08.012⟩. ⟨hal-01873197⟩