Two-disk motion planning strategy

Abstract: "This paper addresses the problem of planning the motion of a polygonal object through a set of planar obstacles. We propose a two-disk motion planning strategy to navigate the object within the free space between the obstacles from an initial location to a final location. This method makes use of the Medial Axis Transform (MAT) of the free space which can be generated efficiently using the method in [10]. We determine two minimal overlapping disks that fully enclose the moving object, and then constrain the centers of the two disks to move continuously along a path on the medial axis. In this paper we direct our efforts to the problem of finding the enclosing disks for a movingobject which is considered as a polygon.We formulate the problem as an optimization problem in terms of the geometry of the polygon to determine a local optimum for a particular edge pair. An algorithm to identify a global optimum from the local optimization result is proposed. Simulations are presented for a varietyof polygons. The method is being used for disassembly motion planning of a subassembly within its parent subassembly."