Path planning method for palletizing tasks using workspace cell decomposition

We present an algorithm to solve path planning tasks for industrial 6-axis robots with a focus on palletizing and handling applications. Given a 3D environment our algorithm decomposes the Cartesian workspace of the robot into 3 dimensional cylinder slices centered around the robot base. The resulting decomposition is searched for a sequence of collision free cells connecting the start and goal position to get a smooth joint trajectory that can be executed by a robot controller and totally lies inside this cylinder cell sequence. We compare our algorithm to an existing, random-based planning algorithm using different scenarios.