HIERARCHICAL PATH PLANNING IN A MULTIROBOT ENVIRONMENT WITH A SIMPLE NAVIGATION FUNCTION

We consider the problem of robot motion planning using an approximate cell decomposition method for Cspace representation. By means of a hie rarchical multilevel discretization we are able to reduce the complexi ty of the problem and to provide a practically feasible procedure for its solution. Hierarchical discretization is based on the use of a mul tisource distance held that is introduced and described in the paper. The developed procedure, used as an heuristic, systematically reduces the amount of memory needed for implementing the motion planning algor ithm, Using such a procedure, several instances of the motion planning problem, involving for example two three-links manipulators acting in the same tridimensional environment, have been solved in a reasonable amount of time.