Sampling-Based Motion Planning on Sequenced Manifolds

Understand

We address the problem of planning robot motions in constrained configuration spaces where the constraints change throughout the motion.

• The problem is formulated as a fixed sequence of intersecting manifolds, which the robot needs to traverse in order to solve the task.
• We specify a class of sequential motion planning problems that fulfill a particular property of the change in the free configuration space when transitioning between manifolds.
• For this problem class, we develop the algorithm Planning on Sequenced Manifolds (PSM*) which searches for optimal intersection points between manifolds by using RRT* in an inner loop with a novel steering strategy.