Collision free path planning based on region clipping for aircraft fuel tank inspection robot

Continuum robot has potential to run freely through a cluttered environment as aircraft fuel tank. To improve manual maintenance, we designed an aircraft fuel tank inspection robot which was composed of cable-driven sections. A suitable path is essential for the robot to reach the target zone while avoiding obstacles, but path planning for continuum robot is a challenge due to their complex kinematics models. To depict the collision free planning problem, a nonlinear, constrained optimization formulation was adopted. Projection strategy was presented and an imaginary straight line between the origin and the target was made up as a reference line to simplify the planning problem. We focused on the decrease of computing time complexity, and based on region clipping, a novel forward search method was proposed to solve this optimization-based planning problem. With the reference straight line, the minimum distance summation (MDS) was calculated to decide the optimal path relatively. Experiments on MATLAB were reasonably designed. Simulations and results analysis demonstrated excellent performance of region clipping search method and feasibility of the avoidance algorithm.