Virtual Environments for Internet-Based Robots—II: Path Planning

This paper addresses the issue of path planning in a virtual environment (VE) for the control of an Internet-based robot manipulator. A hybrid method is proposed in which the dimension of the path-planning problem is reduced by separating the problem of planning the position of the gripper from that of planning the pose of the gripper. A global configuration-space technique is used for the former and a local operational-space technique is used for the latter. Particular attention is paid to fundamental issues such as mapping the graphical model into configuration space, on-line collision detection and obstacle avoidance in the VE.