Online path planning with optimal C-space discretization

The paper is based on a path planning approach for industrial robot arms with 6 degrees of freedom in an online given 3D environment. It has online capabilities by searching in an implicit and discrete configuration space and detecting collisions in the Cartesian workspace by distance computation based on the given CAD model. Here, we present different methods for specifying the C-space discretization. Besides the usual uniform and heuristic discretization, we investigate two versions of an optimal discretization for a user-predefined Cartesian resolution. The different methods are experimentally evaluated. Additionally, we provide a set of 3-dimensional benchmark problems for a fair comparison of the path planner. For each benchmark, the run-times of our planner are between only 3 and 100 seconds on a Pentium PC with 133 MHz.