Visibility analysis and genetic algorithms for fast robot motion planning

Although extensive work about robot path planning has been carried out, there is still a need for fast, practical and general-purpose motion planners. New applications of robots, outside the known and fixed environment of a factory, will increase the need for such planners. In these situations it will be necessary to cope with very variable and complex environments and with direct human interaction. A new approach for n-degree-of-freedom robot motion planning, based on the concept of visibility tetrahedra and the use of genetic algorithms combined with local search methods, is presented in this paper. The proposed approach has been successfully tested over several selected experiments, obtaining fast planning even for complex situations.