Towards a Complete Safe Path Planning for Robotic Manipulators

We propose a novel method of path planning for robotic manipulators that is based on the tree expansion via bubbles of free configuration space. The algorithm is designed to yield collision-free paths that also tend to minimize a certain danger criterion. This is achieved by embedding a suitably tailored heuristics within the algorithm. For that purpose we use a recently proposed safety assessment based on the concept of the danger field - an easily computable quantity that captures the complete kinematic behavior of the manipulator. Under the assumption that a systematic graph search technique dictates the tree growth, we prove the algorithm's completeness.