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Stages in Path Planning

The overall strategy of the path planning system includes three general stages (with a certain amount of interaction between the three). These three stages are:

1.
Find a gap between the obstacles surrounding the moving object in its current position.
2.
Check that the gap is big enough for the moving object to fit through.
3.
Specify directions of motion which take the moving object to the opening of the gap, and then through it.

These three stages appear relatively independent, but they affect each other in the following ways:

These factors make it impossible for the ``stages'' to be carried out independently, but it is still possible to separate the types of reasoning that must be carried out to solve each part of the problem.

The path planning strategy becomes more complex if more complex fields of obstacles are to be dealt with (where the moving object has to move in turn through more than one gap). The implemented system does not deal with this case, but it is discussed along with other possible extensions in the final section of this chapter.


next up previous contents
Next: Gap Finding Up: Reasoning About Path-Planning with Previous: EPB/PDO Implementation.3
Alan Blackwell
2000-11-17