Parallel robot motion planning

A fast, parallel method for computing configuration space maps is presented. The method is made possible by recognizing that one can compute a family of primitive maps which can be combined by superposition based on the distribution of real obstacles. This motion planner has been implemented for the first three degrees-of-freedom of a Puma robot in *Lisp on a Connection Machine with 8 K processors. A six degree-of-freedom version of the algorithm which performs a sequential search of the six-dimensional configuration space, building three-dimensional cross sections in parallel, has also been implemented.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>