A reactive motion planner architecture for generic mobile robots based on multilayered cellular automata

The aim of this paper is to describe the architecture of a Path Planner for Mobile Robots based on the paradigm of Cellular Automata. The environment representation is distributed, as the robot shape; both and the robot kinematics are parameters for the planner. Hence, it results to be very flexible, handling robots with quite different kinematics (omnidirectional, car-like, asymmetrical, etc.), with generic shapes (even with concavities and holes) and with generic cinematic center positions. Because of these characteristics, it is applicable for the assembly planning in the manufacturing industry, as in the Piano Mover’s problems, or in vehicles trajectories generation. It can be applied to flat (Euclidean) Work Space and to natural variable terrains. Considering robots moving with smoothed trajectories, the underlying algorithm is based on a Potential Fields Method, using an anisotropic propagation of potentials on a non-Euclidean manifold. The collision-free trajectories are found following the minimum valley of the potential hypersurface embedded in a 4D space. Thanks to the Multilayered Cellular Automata architecture, it turns out to be very fast, complete and optimal, allowing to react to the wold dynamics (reactive planning), generating new optimal solutions every time the obstacles