Neural network approaches to dynamic collision-free trajectory generation

In this paper, dynamic collision-free trajectory generation in a nonstationary environment is studied using biologically inspired neural network approaches. The proposed neural network is topologically organized, where the dynamics of each neuron is characterized by a shunting equation or an additive equation. The state space of the neural network can be either the Cartesian workspace or the joint space of multi-joint robot manipulators. There are only local lateral connections among neurons. The real-time optimal trajectory is generated through the dynamic activity landscape of the neural network without explicitly searching over the free space nor the collision paths, without explicitly optimizing any global cost functions, without any prior knowledge of the dynamic environment, and without any learning procedures. Therefore the model algorithm is computationally efficient. The stability of the neural network system is guaranteed by the existence of a Lyapunov function candidate. In addition, this model is not very sensitive to the model parameters. Several model variations are presented and the differences are discussed. As examples, the proposed models are applied to generate collision-free trajectories for a mobile robot to solve a maze-type of problem, to avoid concave U-shaped obstacles, to track a moving target and at the same to avoid varying obstacles, and to generate a trajectory for a two-link planar robot with two targets. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches are demonstrated through simulation and comparison studies.