Motion planning for non-holonomic industrial robot vehicles

The problem of planning collision free motions for industrial robot vehicles is considered. The systems presently in use are rather inflexible, the vehicle being rigidly constrained to follow a set of manually derived paths. Such systems are not easily or quickly reconfigurable, nor are they equipped to respond to the presence of unexpected obstacles or variations in object locations. In the hybrid motion control system presented, paths are computed from a routemap of the environment, automatically derived from geometric data. These paths are then followed by the vehicle under the control of a path execution module which utilises an artificial potential field based approach to avoid unexpected obstacles