Real-time robot motion planning using rasterizing computer graphics hardware

  • Authors:

  • Jed Lengyel;Mark Reichert;Bruce R. Donald;Donald P. Greenberg

  • Affiliations:

  • Graduate Student, Program of Computer Graphics, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.;Graduate Student, Program of Computer Graphics, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.;Assistant Professor and Director, Computer Science Robotics Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, 4130 Upson HalI, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.;Director, Program of Computer Graphics, Jacob Gould Shurman Professor of Computer Graphics, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

  • Venue:
  • SIGGRAPH '90 Proceedings of the 17th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

We present a real-time robot motion planner that is fast and complete to a resolution. The technique is guaranteed to find a path if one exists at the resolution, and all paths returned are safe. The planner can handle any polyhedral geometry of robot and obstacles, including disjoint and highly concave unions of polyhedra.The planner uses standard graphics hardware to rasterize configuration space obstacles into a series of bitmap slices, and then uses dynamic programming to create a navigation function (a discrete vector-valued function) and to calculate paths in this rasterized space. The motion paths which the planner produces are minimal with respect to an L1 (Manhattan) distance metric that includes rotation as well as translation.Several examples are shown illustrating the competence of the planner at generating planar rotational and translational plans for complex two and three dimensional robots. Dynamic motion sequences, including complicated and non-obvious backtracking solutions, can be executed in real time.