Visibility analysis and genetic algorithms for fast robot motion planning

Although extensive work about robot path planning has been carried out during the last years, there is still a need for fast, practical and general-purpose motion planners. Currently, new applications of robots, outside the known and fixed environment of a factory, will increase the need for these planners. In this situations it will be necessary to cope with very variable and complex environments and with the direct human interaction. A new approach for n degrees of freedom robot motion planning, based on the concept of the 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.