Ing of Connguration Space for Fast Path Planning

This paper presents a new approach to path planning for robots with many degrees of freedom (dof) operating in known static environments. The approach consists of a preprocessing and a planning stage. Preprocessing, which is done only once for a given environment, generates a network of randomly, but properly selected, collision-free conngurations (nodes). Planning then connects any given initial and nal conngurations of the robot to two nodes of the network and computes a path through the network between these two nodes. Experiments show that after paying the preprocessing cost (on the order of hundreds of seconds), planning is extremely fast (on the order of a fraction of a second for many diicult examples involving a 10-dof robot). The approach is particularly attractive for many-dof robots which have to perform many successive point-to-point motions in the same environment. Early stages of this research beneeted from discussions with J er^ ome Barraquand.