Reactive motion planning: A multiagent approach

We present an efficient approach to reactive robot motion planning and collision avoidance. Unlike the traditional methods, there is no centralized control; instead the links and the joints of the robot are autonomous agents. This is a completely new approach. A set of dynamic equations of motion for an arbitrary robot is derived. Artificial forces are introduced to express and combine multiple, possibly conflicting objectives, such as avoiding obstacles while approaching a goal. The joint agents impose forces of constraint between the link agents, and these forces establish a flow of information among the agents. The emergent behavior of the multiagent system gives an impression of surprisingly intelligent overall control. The developed method is used in actual industrial applications to control welding robot installations for ship building with up to 11 degrees of freedom (DOF). Experimental results from the simulation of a 25-DOF snakelike robot operating in a complex three-dimensional structure are given. It is demonstrated that the time complexity is O(n 3 )for branched n-DOF robots, while for serial robots such as standard manipulators and the snake, it is O(n).