Minimum Displacement Motion Planning for Movable Obstacles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel motion planning approach that minimizes obstacle displacement by defining a metric for robot-obstacle intersection, enabling the robot to find feasible paths through iterative obstacle adjustments.

Contribution

It proposes a new minimum displacement motion planning method that incorporates a robot-obstacle intersection metric and iterative obstacle displacement to find feasible paths.

Findings

Successfully finds feasible paths with minimal obstacle displacement

Demonstrates effectiveness through multiple example scenarios

Introduces a new intersection metric for planning

Abstract

This paper presents a minimum displacement motion planning problem wherein obstacles are displaced by a minimum amount to find a feasible path. We define a metric for robot-obstacle intersection that measures the extent of the intersection and use this to penalize robot-obstacle overlaps. Employing the actual robot dynamics, the planner first finds a path through the obstacles that minimizes the robot-obstacle intersections. The metric is then used to iteratively displace the obstacles to achieve a feasible path. Several examples are provided that successfully demonstrates the proposed problem.