Automatic collision free path planning in hybrid triangle and point models: A case study

Collision free path planning is a key technology for assembly analysis, robot line optimization, and virtual assessment of industrial maintenance and service. The ability to compute collision free paths relies on the ability to quickly and robustly query the proximity of the planning object to its surroundings. Path planning with triangulated models is a well studied problem, however, hybrid models comprising both points and triangles present new and difficult challenges. Working directly with point clouds is becoming more relevant because it allows one to scan existing industrial installations and path plan with the scan data instead of possibly incorrect planned layouts. In this paper we implement and analyze a new hybrid path planning interface on a case study in robot line manufacturing and demonstrate its feasibility in comparison to an existing CAD model of the work environment and show that triangulating the original point cloud is undesirable for path planning.