Real-time robot motion planning using rasterizing computer graphics hardware

TLDR

The paper introduces a real‑time robot motion planner that is fast and complete to a specified resolution. The planner rasterizes configuration‑space obstacles into bitmap slices using standard graphics hardware and applies dynamic programming to build a navigation function that computes paths for any polyhedral robot and obstacle geometry. The planner guarantees safe, L1‑optimal paths when they exist, and demonstrates real‑time execution on complex planar and spatial robots with backtracking solutions.

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.