On improving the clearance for robots in high-dimensional configuration spaces

In robot motion planning, many algorithms have been proposed that create a path for a robot in an environment with obstacles. Since it can be hard to create such paths, most algorithms are aimed at finding a solution. However, for most applications the paths must be of a good quality as well. That is, paths should preferably be short, be smooth, and should preserve some clearance from the obstacles. In this paper, we focus on improving the clearance of paths. Existing methods only extract high clearance paths for rigid, translating bodies. We present an algorithm that improves the clearance along paths of a broader range of robots which may reside in arbitrary high-dimensional configuration spaces. Examples include planar, free-flying and articulated robots.

I. Introduction

Motion planning is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. The motion planning problem can be defined as finding a path between a start and goal placement of a robot in an environment with obstacles. The last decade, efficient algorithms have been devised to tackle this problem. They are successfully applied in fields such as mobile robots, manipulation planning, CAD systems, virtual environments, protein folding and human robot planning. See e.g. the books of Latombe [1] and Lavalle [2] for many interesting results.