Real-time generation of collision-free paths for a mobile sphere

A novel and fast technique for solving the basic motion-planning problem is introduced. Obstacle avoidance is based on the computation of minimum translational distances that allows one to obtain collision-free intermediate configurations. When path planning is constrained to two degrees of freedom, Hough transform is applied to such configurations. After that, several collision-free paths are generating by joining different sets of selected intermediate configurations. These selections are obtained by applying the technique called minimum volume locus. Complexity of this path planner is linear with the number of obstacles. Object representation is based on spherically extended polytopes