FAST MOTION PLANNING BY PARALLEL-PROCESSING - A REVIEW

One of the many features needed to support the activities of autonomou s systems is the ability to plan motion. This enables robots to move i n their environment securely and to accomplish given tasks. Unfortunat ely, the control loop comprising sensing, planning, and acting has not yet been closed for robots in dynamic environments. One reason involv es the long execution times of the motion planning component. A soluti on for this problem is offered by the use of highly parallel computati on. Thus, an important task is the parallelization of existing motion planning algorithms for robots so that they are suitable for highly pa rallel computation. In several cases, completely new algorithms have t o be designed, so that a parallelization is feasible. In this survey, we review recent approaches to motion planning using parallel computat ion. As a classification scheme, we use the structure given by the dif ferent approaches to the robot's motion planning. For each approach, t he available parallel processing methods are discussed. Each approach is assigned a unique class. Finally, for each research work referenced , a list of keywords is given.