GENERAL PLANNING METHOD FOR MACHINE COORDINATION AND RENDEZVOUS

This paper describes a general method for representing and solving planning problems. The framework has well-defined subcomponents to simplify the problem using transforms, define costs over permissible motions, define illegal regions in the transformed space, and efficiently find optimal motions. The method fully exploits any a priori information and also provides a method to augment this information efficiently at runtime. The method is powerful in that it can be used in arbitrarily high dimensional spaces, and has been used to solve non-holonomic problems efficiently and with ease. Examples will be given for moving robotic equipment optimally while avoiding obstacles, for automatically maneuvering a vehicle around obstacles, and for determining alternative rendezvous locations for machinery based on the separate constraints (time, space, fuel, etc.) of each. The rendezvous problem will also give optimal strategies, and precise paths.