To exploit the potential benefit of multi-robot workcells, powerful motion planning and motion execution paradigms are necessary. The novel framework of elastic strips allows real-time obstacle avoidance and implicit motion coordination for multiple robots in a shared workspace. I t augments motion plans with a reactive component allowing the avoidance of unpredictably moving obstacles. The obs...

We present an approach for synthesizing reactive robot motion plans, based on compilation to SyntaxGuided Synthesis (SyGuS) specifications. Our method reduces the motion planning problem to the problem of synthesizing a function that can choose the next robot action in response to the current state of the system. This technique offers reactivity not by generating new motion plans throughout dep...

The textbook on motion planning “Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations”, by H. Choset et al., MIT Press, which appeared in June 2005, is reviewed and compared with two other textbooks on the same subject, from 1991 and 2006, respectively. The ground-breaking developments over the last decade justify the necessity of the newer textbooks, which appear to be complemen...

Exploiting Structure: A Guided Approach to Sampling-Based Robot Motion Planning

We present a novel approach to motion planning for robot manipulators in known environments. The key concept h to evaluate coz.qdefe trajectories between start and goal in the workspace and to reshape them incrementally. The evaluation is based on virtual modifications of the geometry model of the robot. An initially colliding trajectory is bended in space to be improved with respect to the eva...

We consider the path-planning problem for a robot pushing an object in an environment containing obstacles. This new variant of the classical robot pathplanning problem has several interesting geometric aspects, which we explore. We focus on the setting where the robot makes a point contact with the object which is assumed to be a unit disk, while the obstacles are assumed to be polygonal.

In this paper, two kinds of biologically inspired robots under investigation at Johns Hopkins University are reviewed. While these designs are reminiscent of designs in nature, they are, however, not anthropomorphic. Rather, they are zoomorphic in macroscopic structure. These two kinds of robots are snakelike “hyper-redundant” manipulators, and amoeboid “metamorphic” robots. In addition to issu...