Towards Real-Time Motion Planning for Industrial Robots in Collaborative Environments

Abstract

In collaborative environments, real-time motion planning is crucial for industrial robots to navigate safely and efficiently. Traditional planning algorithms, such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) or Probabilistic Roadmaps (PRM), often face challenges in coping with dynamic environments due to their inherent computational complexity. To address this issue, we propose an approach based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for real-time motion planning of industrial robots. Our method leverages the power of machine learning and neural networks to enable robots to make intelligent decisions in real-time, ensuring prompt and adaptive navigation. However, applying DRL to industrial robots poses unique challenges, as vision-based training is difficult and distance sensors commonly used in mobile robots are unavailable. To overcome these challenges, we employ depth cameras to generate distance information and convert the obtained point cloud into voxels using the Open3D library. The obstacles are then loaded into the simulation environment in real-time, allowing the agent to perceive and react to the dynamic environment. To achieve a low simulation-to-real-gap, we propose a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) approach, where the real robot mimics the movements of the simulated robot. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through real-world experiments. Our code is available on GitHub [1].