Planning in a Topologist's World

The Players

Robot:                                          2D Rigid Body With Rotation (R^2*S^1)
Motion Model:                            Standard Holonomic Model
Weapon:                                       Randomized Roadmap Planner
Collision Detection Method:       Precomputed 3D Bitmap

The Mission

This project will attempt to plan a path for a rotating 2D rigid body.  The robot will move through a topologists world featuring identified boundaries.  The project aims to plan for robot motion on a cylinder, torus, and Mobius Band. The system will use a randomized roadmap planning algorithm in conjunction with a precomputed 3D bitmap collision detection method.

The Challenges

The identification of boundary conditions will be a significant challenge for this project.  The precomputed bitmap should alleviate the problems associated with detecting collisions for cases where the robot has 'wandered' off of the edge of the world.

**An additional challenge will be to develop the system to allow the users to arbitrarily define the identifications for the world. The identifications for each axis would be limited to {no identification, parallel identification, or reverse identification}. This would allow for up to 6  (3 * 3) choices for the user to define the robots configuration space.

The Visualization

The visualization system of this project will be implemented in OpenGL.  The UI will be generated with Rapid App. The UI will allow the user to define the robot and obstacle region interactively. The user will also be able to select the robots beginning and ending points interactively. The system will provide methods for animating the computed pathway.