Gross motion planning—a survey

Abstract

Motion planning is one of the most important areas of robotics research. The complexity of the motion-planning problem has hindered the development of practical algorithms. This paper surveys the work on gross-motion planning, including motion planners for point robots, rigid robots, and manipulators in stationary, time-varying, constrained, and movable-object environments. The general issues in motion planning are explained. Recent approaches and their performances are briefly described, and possible future research directions are discussed.