Continuous motion planning in unknown environment for a 3D cartesian robot arm

The approach (called Continuous Path Planning, or CPP) developed in [1,10] for non-heuristic path planning for a point automaton or various planar robot arms moving in an environment with unknown obstacles, is extended here on a three-dimensional (3D) cartesian arm. The task is to move the arm endpoint from the starting to a target position. The arm body is assumed to be capable of "feeling" a contact (physical or at a distance) with an obstacle. With such local information, the convergence to a global goal can be assured. No constraints are imposed on the shape of the obstacles.