A global and resolution complete path planner for up to 6DOF robot manipulators

We present a resolution complete point to point path planner for up to 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) robot manipulators, based on a discretized configuration space (C-space) representation. The robot operates in an initially known workspace (W-space). Vision integration in an easy way makes the planner capable of dealing with initially unknown obstacles. Furthermore, a Kohonen map based reorganization of the C-space increases the resolution in collision free regions of the C-space and enables path finding even for difficult paths. Experiments with low on-line computation times (lying in the order of a fraction of a second to a few seconds) demonstrate the effectiveness of the planner