Safe Interval Randomized Path Planning For Manipulators

TL;DR

This paper introduces SI-RRT, a novel planning algorithm that combines safe-interval path planning with bidirectional RRT-Connect to efficiently generate safe paths for high-DoF manipulators in dynamic environments.

Contribution

The paper proposes SI-RRT, an innovative algorithm that integrates safe-interval computation with randomized bidirectional RRT for improved high-dimensional path planning.

Findings

SI-RRT outperforms existing methods in runtime.

SI-RRT produces lower-cost paths.

The approach effectively handles dynamic obstacles.

Abstract

Planning safe paths in 3D workspace for high DoF robotic systems, such as manipulators, is a challenging problem, especially when the environment is populated with the dynamic obstacles that need to be avoided. In this case the time dimension should be taken into account that further increases the complexity of planning. To mitigate this issue we suggest to combine safe-interval path planning (a prominent technique in heuristic search) with the randomized planning, specifically, with the bidirectional rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT-Connect) - a fast and efficient algorithm for high-dimensional planning. Leveraging a dedicated technique of fast computation of the safe intervals we end up with an efficient planner dubbed SI-RRT. We compare it with the state of the art and show that SI-RRT consistently outperforms the competitors both in runtime and solution cost. Our implementation of SI-RRT is publicly available at https://github.com/PathPlanning/ManipulationPlanning-SI-RRT