Date of Award

8-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Computer Science

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Chinwe P Ekenna

Committee Members

Paliath Narendran, Jeong-Hyon Hwang, Boris Goldfarb, Mukulika Ghosh

Keywords

Computational Biology, Robot Motion Planning, Topology and geometry

Subject Categories

Computer Sciences

Abstract

Motion planning is a fundamental problem in robotics, which involves finding a path for an autonomous system, such as a robot, from a given source to a destination while avoiding collisions with obstacles. The properties of the planning space heavily influence the performance of existing motion planning algorithms, which can pose significant challenges in handling complex regions, such as narrow passages or cluttered environments, even for simple objects. The problem of motion planning becomes deterministic if the details of the space are fully known, which is often difficult to achieve in constantly changing environments. Sampling-based algorithms are widely used among motion planning paradigms because they capture the topology of space into a roadmap. These planners have successfully solved high-dimensional planning problems with a probabilistic-complete guarantee, i.e., it guarantees to find a path if one exists as the number of vertices goes to infinity. Despite their progress, these methods have failed to optimize the sub-region information of the environment for reuse by other planners. This results in re-planning overhead at each execution, affecting the performance complexity for computation time and memory space usage.

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