Path Planning Based on Distance Transformation and Its VLSI Implementation

Abstract

This paper presents a fast path planning method to find a feasible collision-free path. A collision-free path is searched for by iterations of selection of a robot configuration and collision detection for it. A most promising configuration is selected according to a minimum distance from every point in 3-D workspace and obstacles. The configuration selection keeps a robot as far away as possible from obstacles, and reduces the number of configurations for collision detection. Moreover, a highly-parallel processor based on logicin-memory architecture is proposed to overcome a transfer bottleneck between a memory and processing elements.