A 3-D POTENTIAL PANEL METHOD FOR ROBOT MOTION PLANNING

A potential panel method is proposed to solve the collision-free path planning problem for a free-flying robot operating in an obstacle fill ed 3-D environment. The problem is solved in three steps: (1) transfor m the arbitrary shaped obstacles in the 3-D workspace into simple conv ex polyhedrons; (2) generate an artificial potential field using the 3 -D panel method in the 3-D workspace; (3) generate a streamline from t he starting position towards the goal position in the artificial poten tial held. The computational complexity of the pertinent algorithms ju stify the efficiency of the approach and its applicability in real-tim e. Simulation results illustrate the potential of the proposed approac h. The reported research is the outgrowth of the 2-D method, already p ublished.(1)