159,087 research outputs found
RoboTSP - A Fast Solution to the Robotic Task Sequencing Problem
In many industrial robotics applications, such as spot-welding,
spray-painting or drilling, the robot is required to visit successively
multiple targets. The robot travel time among the targets is a significant
component of the overall execution time. This travel time is in turn greatly
affected by the order of visit of the targets, and by the robot configurations
used to reach each target. Therefore, it is crucial to optimize these two
elements, a problem known in the literature as the Robotic Task Sequencing
Problem (RTSP). Our contribution in this paper is two-fold. First, we propose a
fast, near-optimal, algorithm to solve RTSP. The key to our approach is to
exploit the classical distinction between task space and configuration space,
which, surprisingly, has been so far overlooked in the RTSP literature. Second,
we provide an open-source implementation of the above algorithm, which has been
carefully benchmarked to yield an efficient, ready-to-use, software solution.
We discuss the relationship between RTSP and other Traveling Salesman Problem
(TSP) variants, such as the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP), and
show experimentally that our method finds motion sequences of the same quality
but using several orders of magnitude less computation time than existing
approaches.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 1 tabl
Streamlines for Motion Planning in Underwater Currents
Motion planning for underwater vehicles must consider the effect of ocean
currents. We present an efficient method to compute reachability and cost
between sample points in sampling-based motion planning that supports
long-range planning over hundreds of kilometres in complicated flows. The idea
is to search a reduced space of control inputs that consists of stream
functions whose level sets, or streamlines, optimally connect two given points.
Such stream functions are generated by superimposing a control input onto the
underlying current flow. A streamline represents the resulting path that a
vehicle would follow as it is carried along by the current given that control
input. We provide rigorous analysis that shows how our method avoids exhaustive
search of the control space, and demonstrate simulated examples in complicated
flows including a traversal along the east coast of Australia, using actual
current predictions, between Sydney and Brisbane.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted to IEEE ICRA 2019. Copyright 2019 IEE
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