scholarly journals Smooth Path Planning for Robot Docking in Unknown Environment with Obstacles

Complexity ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peng Cui ◽  
Weisheng Yan ◽  
Rongxin Cui ◽  
Jiahui Yu

This paper presents an integrated approach to plan smooth path for robots docking in unknown environments with obstacles. To determine the smooth collision-free path in obstacle environment, a tree structure with heuristic expanding strategy is designed as the foundation of path planning in this approach. The tree employs 3D Dubins curves as its branches and foundation for path feasibility evaluation. For the efficiency of the tree expanding in obstacle environment, intermediate nodes and collision-free branches are determined inspired by the elastic band theory. A feasible path is chosen as the shortest series of branches that connects to the docking station after the sufficient expansion of the tree. Simulation results are presented to show the validity and feasibility of the proposed approach.

2010 ◽  
Vol 450 ◽  
pp. 128-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neng Jian Wang ◽  
De Fu Zhang ◽  
Li Jie Zhou

A path re-planning method is proposed based on a discretization of the state space, aiming at finding a collision-free path for the vehicle which is capable of forward and backward motion when changes occur in the environment. A Control Set with Turning Radius Constraint (CSTRC) is formulated and the feasibility of paths in CSTRC is also proved out. The A* search is applied to produce a feasible path considering the distance and angle between the vehicle and the target pose. Path re-planning can be carried out efficiently when the environment changes. Simulation results demonstrate that the method realizes path re-planning effectively and the path satisfy the turning radius constraint.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Yi Xu ◽  
Shanshang Gao ◽  
Guoxin Jiang ◽  
Xiaotong Gong ◽  
Hongxue Li ◽  
...  

The existing automatic parking algorithms often neglect the unknown obstacles in the parking environment, which causes a hidden danger to the safety of the automatic parking system. Therefore, this paper proposes parking space detection and path planning based on the VIDAR method (vision-IMU-based detection and range method) to solve the problem. In the parking space detection stage, the generalized obstacles are detected based on VIDAR to determine the obstacle areas, and then parking lines are detected by the Hough transform to determine the empty parking space. Compared with the parking detection method based on YOLO v5, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has higher accuracy in complex parking environments with unknown obstacles. In the path planning stage, the path optimization algorithm of the A ∗ algorithm combined with the Bezier curve is used to generate smooth curves, and the environmental information is updated in real time based on VIDAR. The simulation results show that the method can make the vehicle efficiently avoid the obstacles and generate a smooth path in a dynamic parking environment, which can well meet the safety and stationarity of the parking requirements.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (16) ◽  
pp. 7599
Author(s):  
Qiang Cheng ◽  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Hongshuai Liu ◽  
Ying Zhang ◽  
Lina Hao

Autonomous, flexible, and human–robot collaboration are the key features of the next-generation robot. Such unstructured and dynamic environments bring great challenges in online adaptive path planning. The robots have to avoid dynamic obstacles and follow the original task path as much as possible. A robust and efficient online path planning method is required accordingly. A method based on the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), Gaussian Mixture Regression (GMR), and the Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) is proposed to overcome the above difficulties. During the offline stage, the GMM was used to model teaching data, and it can represent the offline-demonstrated motion and constraints. The optimal solution was encoded in the mean value, while the environmental constraints were encoded in the variance value. The GMR generated a smooth path with variance as the resample space according to the GMM of the teaching data. This representation isolated the old environment model with the novel obstacle. During the online stage, a Modified Probabilistic Roadmap (MPRM) was used to plan the motion locally. Because the GMM provides the distribution of all the feasible motion, the sampling space of the MPRM was generated by the variable density resampling method, and then, the roadmap was constructed according to the Euclidean and Probability Distance (EPD). The Dijkstra algorithm was used to search for the feasible path between the starting point and the target point. Finally, shortcut pruning and B-spline interpolation were used to generate a smooth path. During the simulation experiment, two obstacles were added to the recurrent scene to indicate the difference from the teaching scene, and the GMM/GMR-MPRM algorithm was used for path planning. The result showed that it can still plan a feasible path when the recurrent scene is not the same as the teaching scene. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm was verified on the IRB1200 robot experiment platform.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-505
Author(s):  
G. Kulathunga ◽  
◽  
D. Devitt ◽  
R. Fedorenko ◽  
A. Klimchik ◽  
...  

Any obstacle-free path planning algorithm, in general, gives a sequence of waypoints that connect start and goal positions by a sequence of straight lines, which does not ensure the smoothness and the dynamic feasibility to maneuver the MAV. Kinodynamic-based motion planning is one of the ways to impose dynamic feasibility in planning. However, kinodynamic motion planning is not an optimal solution due to high computational demands for real-time applications. Thus, we explore path planning followed by kinodynamic smoothing while ensuring the dynamic feasibility of MAV. The main difference in the proposed technique is not to use kinodynamic planning when finding a feasible path, but rather to apply kinodynamic smoothing along the obtained feasible path. We have chosen a geometric-based path planning algorithm “RRT*” as the path finding algorithm. In the proposed technique, we modified the original RRT* introducing an adaptive search space and a steering function that helps to increase the consistency of the planner. Moreover, we propose a multiple RRT* that generates a set of desired paths. The optimal path from the generated paths is selected based on a cost function. Afterwards, we apply kinodynamic smoothing that will result in a dynamically feasible as well as obstacle-free path. Thereafter, a b-spline-based trajectory is generated to maneuver the vehicle autonomously in unknown environments. Finally, we have tested the proposed technique in various simulated environments. According to the experiment results, we were able to speed up the path planning task by 1.3 times when using the proposed multiple RRT* over the original RRT*.


Author(s):  
Jie Zhong ◽  
Tao Wang ◽  
Lianglun Cheng

AbstractIn actual welding scenarios, an effective path planner is needed to find a collision-free path in the configuration space for the welding manipulator with obstacles around. However, as a state-of-the-art method, the sampling-based planner only satisfies the probability completeness and its computational complexity is sensitive with state dimension. In this paper, we propose a path planner for welding manipulators based on deep reinforcement learning for solving path planning problems in high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. Compared with the sampling-based method, it is more robust and is less sensitive with state dimension. In detail, to improve the learning efficiency, we introduce the inverse kinematics module to provide prior knowledge while a gain module is also designed to avoid the local optimal policy, we integrate them into the training algorithm. To evaluate our proposed planning algorithm in multiple dimensions, we conducted multiple sets of path planning experiments for welding manipulators. The results show that our method not only improves the convergence performance but also is superior in terms of optimality and robustness of planning compared with most other planning algorithms.


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