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Homotopic Roadmap Generation for Robot Motion Planning

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Abstract

Two robot paths are said to be in the same homotopic group if one can be obtained from the other by multiple small deformations. Knowledge of robot homotopic groups gives information regarding the obstacle structure and enables timely computation of optimal path. Making a roadmap which misses out on a single homotopic group in such approaches may lead to sub-optimal decisions. E.g. one may prefer to go through a very narrow corridor if that reduces the path length significantly, but not if the resulting path has too many such narrow segments. Similarly knowledge of homotopic groups may enable distribution and scheduling of robots across homotopic groups for decentralized planning of multiple robots. For an unstructured robot environment, sampling based approaches give an insight into homotopic groups. The aim of the work is to make a homotopy conscious Probabilistic Roadmap such that the roadmap is capable of generating paths corresponding to as many homotopic groups as possible. Experimental results confirm that the proposed approach gives the best results as compared to the other sampling techniques subject to the test scenarios run.

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  1. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad, Allahabad, India

    Rahul Kala

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  1. Rahul Kala
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Kala, R. Homotopic Roadmap Generation for Robot Motion Planning. J Intell Robot Syst 82, 555–575 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0278-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-015-0278-z

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