Accessibility: a new approach to path planning among moving obstacles

A study is performed of the problem of planning a collision-free path for a robot in a time-varying environment. It is assumed that an obstacle moves along a known path. The formulation also allows the destination point (the point to be reached) to move along a predetermined path. A concept of `accessibility´ from a point to a moving object is introduced and is used to determine a collision-free path. An environment which contains some uncertainty in which the robot needs to see and possibly plan an alternative path is also considered. The ability to deal with moving obstacles is useful in a variety of visual tasks such as the navigation of an autonomous vehicle and the interaction between robot arms