Repeatable Motion Planning for Redundant Robots Over Cyclic Tasks

We consider the problem of repeatable motion planning for redundant robotic systems performing cyclic tasks in the presence of obstacles. For this open problem, we present a control-based randomized planner, which produces closed collision-free paths in configuration space and guarantees continuous satisfaction of the task constraints. The proposed algorithm, which relies on bidirectional search and loop closure in the task-constrained configuration space, is shown to be probabilistically complete. A modified version of the planner is also devised for the case in which configuration-space paths are required to be smooth. Finally, we present planning results in various scenarios involving both free-flying and nonholonomic robots to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.