Minimum Displacement Motion Planning for Movable Obstacles

Abstract: This paper presents a minimum displacement motion planning problem wherein obstacles are displaced by a minimum amount to find a feasible path. We define a metric for robot-obstacle intersection that measures the extent of the intersection and use this to penalize robot-obstacle overlaps. Employing the actual robot dynamics, the planner first finds a path through the obstacles that minimizes the robot-obstacle intersections. The metric is then used to iteratively displace the obstacles to achieve a feasible path. Several examples are provided that successfully demonstrates the proposed problem.