Report Number: CS-TR-94-1531
Institution: Stanford University, Department of Computer Science
Title: On-Line Manipulation Planning for Two Robot Arms in a Dynamic
Environment
Author: Li, Tsai-Yen
Author: Latombe, Jean-Claude
Date: December 1994
Abstract: In a constantly changing and partially unpredictable
environment, robot motion planning must be on-line. The
planner receives a continuous flow of information about
occurring events and generates new plans, while previously
planned motions are being executed. This paper describes an
on-line planner for two cooperating arms whose task is to
grab parts of various types on a conveyor belt and transfer
them to their respective goals while avoiding collision with
obstacles. Parts arrive on the belt in random order, at any
time. Both goals and obstacles may be dynamically changed.
This scenario is typical of manufacturing cells serving
machine-tools, assembling products, or packaging objects. The
proposed approach breaks the overall planning problem into
subproblems, each involving a low-dimensional configuration
or configuration-time space, and orchestrates very fast
primitives solving these subproblems. The resulting planner
has been implemented and extensively tested in a simulated
environment, as well as with a real dual-arm system. Its
competitiveness has been evaluated against an oracle making
(almost) the best decision at any one time; the results show
that the planner compares extremely well.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/94/1531/CS-TR-94-1531.pdf