Version 1.0, August 31, 2001, Copyright, Hugh Jack 1993-2001

40.1.4 EVALUATION OF PATH PLANNERS

It is valuable to have a number of criteria to determine the value of a path planning method. These values should reflect the information required, the time (and complexity) of the method, the type of results, and the level of abstraction from the manipulator.

 

  1.  
  2. GENERAL REQUIREMENTS EVALUATION CRITERIA:
  3. - Dimensions of Space (2D, 2.5D, 3D)
  4. - Collision Avoidance (None, Contact Detection, Proximity Calculation)
  5. - Multilink Manipulators
  6. - Rotations of Payload
  7. - Moving Workspace Obstacles
  8. - Multi Robot Coordination
  9. - Degree of Automation
  10. INFORMATION SETUP EVALUATION CRITERIA:
  11. - Information Source (Knowledge Based, Sensor Based)
  12. - World Modelling
  13. METHOD EVALUATION CRITERIA:
  14. - Path Planning Strategies, for information passing (eg. Hierarchical)
  15. - Path Planning Methods (algorithms used for path planning)
  16. - Internal Representations
  17. - Minimization (Which Costs are minimized?)
  18. - Limits (Which limits are considered?)
  19. - Solution type (Robot, Joint Space, Cartesian Space, Straight Line,
  20. Via Points with Rotations, Splines, etc.)
  21. IMPLEMENTATION EVALUATION CRITERIA:
  22. - Execution (Time, Machine, Language)
  23. - Testing (What are the experimental results?)

 

Most of these categories are quite basic, but some are not so clearly defined. All of these areas will be discussed in the subsequent sections.