Towards efficient motion planning for manipulators with complex geometry

Considers the issues involved in writing path planners that can work well with complex geometric models of robots and workspaces, and outline the authors' work in implementing a solution. The authors' claim that many path planning problems can be solved by a mixture of global and local planning. In turn, local planning can be usefully supported by the provision of efficient distance computations, and the authors describe a variation on the algorithm of Gilbert, Johnson and Keerthi (1988), that they have packaged together with a hierarchical decomposition of objects for added efficiency. Global planning requires more domain-dependent techniques, but the authors have been experimenting with approximations to the generalised Voronoi diagram, and results for this system are shown using a path planner based on the authors' method of virtual springs.