Planning multi-goal tours for robot arms

Abstract

This paper considers the following multi-goal motion planning problem: a robot a m must reach several goal configurations an some sequence, but this sequence is not given. Instead, the robot's planner must compute an optimal o r near-optimal path through the goals. This problem occurs, for instance, in spot-welding, inspection, and measurement tasks. It combines two computationally hard sub-problems: the shortest-path and traveling-salesman problems. This paper describes a greedy algorithm that operates under the adsumption that the number of goals is relatively small (a few dozen at most) and the computational cost of finding a good path between two goals dominates that of finding a good tour in n graph with edges of given costs. Although the algorithm computes a quadratic number of goal-to-goal paths in the worst case, it is much faster in practice.

RoboTSP – A Fast Solution to the Robotic Task Sequencing Problem

“…In [4], the authors consider a RTSP with one configuration per target, which can then be formulated as a regular TSP. The emphasis here is on collision-free trajectories, which are difficult to find when the environment includes obstacles.…”

Three-dimensional coverage planning for an underwater inspection robot

“…An alternate approach developed by Saha et al (2003Saha et al ( , 2006 emphasizes the construction of high-quality paths among a small subset of O( n) view-to-view pairings. This method assumes the cost of computing an approximate TSP solution is minor compared with the cost of building feasible paths, and it is intended for problems of high dimension and complex geometry.…”

Collision-free motion planning and scheduling

“…Saha et al in [10] provided solutions for the multi-goal motion planning problem of a single robot using probabilistic road map planning. The calculation of the optimum tour was approached as a traveling salesman problem.…”