Application of Robotic Obstacle Avoidance in Crane Lift Path Planning

Crane lift path planning aims to find a collision-free trajectory for the lifted object among on-site obstacles from its pick location to the final location. However, the current manual planning process is time-consuming, prone to errors, and requires the practitioners to have exceptional visual abilities, since the construction site is congested and dynamically changing. Therefore, the need for developing a decision support system, to automate the crane path planning process, is quite eminent. This paper presents a methodology based on robotic motion planning to numerically solve the crane path planning problem. The proposed methodology conducts 2D path planning for a crane lift operation and accounts for the rotation of the lifted object during its movements. The proposed methodology has been implemented into a computer module, which provides a user-friendly interface to aid the practitioners to perform a collision-free path planning, and check the feasibility of the path at different stages of the project. Two examples are described in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology and illustrate the essential features of the developed module. This research project is supported by PCL Industrial Constructors Inc.