Interactive motion planning for assembly tasks

This paper presents an application of a motion planning algorithm to interactive systems. The proposed approach aims at improving the guidance of an operator during an assembling/dis-assembling task in a virtual environment with the help of an automatic path planning algorithm in PLM operations (PLM stands for product lifecycle management, which is the process of managing the lifecycle of a product, from conception to service). Existing works use a two-step decomposition which limits the interaction between the user and the ongoing process. We propose a modification of a classic motion planning method, the rapidly-exploring random tree to build an Interactive-RRT. This method is based on exchanging forces between the algorithm and the user, and on data gathering (labels) from the virtual scene. Examples are shown to illustrate the interactive motion planning system.