New concept of visibility tetrahedra for fast robot motion planning

New applications of robots, outside the known and fixed environment of a factory, will increase the need for planners. In this situations it will be necessary to cope with very variable and complex environments and with the direct human interaction. An approach for n degrees of freedom robot motion planning, based on the concept of the visibility tetrahedra and the use of genetic algorithms combined with local search methods is presented. The proposed approach has been successfully tested over several selected experiments obtaining fast planning even for complex situations.