Augmenting human performance in motion planning tasks-the configuration space approach

The paper is concerned with the development of methods that can be used to augment human performance in three degree of freedom (DOF) motion planning tasks. Previous experimental studies have shown that human performance in such motion planning tasks is inadequate, especially when complex objects and/or environments are involved. Our approach is based on the use of configuration space (C-Space) to simplify the motion planning task from that of moving a complex object in work space (W-space) to moving a point in a C-space maze. Tools are developed which allow the user to easily grasp all the information contained in 3D C-space and use it to solve the task at hand.