Fast collision-free path planning for translating mobiler in three-dimensional space

This paper describes a novel method of planning collision-free path for a translating mobiler in three-dimensional workspace. The safe path is found in short calculation time by the proposed method, so that it is feasible to be applied for real-time processing. Especially, in case there exist a lot of complicated obstacles in the workspace, the advantages of the method appear more efficiently. In general collision-free path planning methods, Configuration Space is often applied. Utilization of the space is very effective to plan the safe path, but it requires so much calculation time. In this paper, in order to get the calculation time shorter, rectangular parallelepiped forbidden areas are introduced, instead of the general forbidden area in the configuration space. To apply the rectangular parallelepiped forbidden area makes the interference detection of the path against the forbidden area much easier and faster, and moreover, it makes the determination of the direction to which the path goes definite. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed in numerical experiments.