Path Planning for Highly Redundant Manipulators Using a Continuous Model

There is a need for highly redundant manipulators to work in complex, cluttered environments. Our goal is to plan paths for such manipulators efficiently. The path planning problem‘ has been shown to be PSPACE-complete in terms of the number of degrees of freedom (DOF) of the manipulator. We present a method which overcomes the complexity with a strong heuristic: utilizing redundancy by means of a continuous manipulator model. The continuous model allows us to change the complexity of the problem from a function of both the DOF\ of the manipulator (believed to be exponential) and the complexity of the environment (polynomial), to a polynomial function of the complexity of the environment only.

Authors

• Akira Hayashi Benjamin J. Kuipers

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