Robot Motion Planning

The course is intended as a first level introduction to robot motion planning for students,teachers and industry personal. Historically, robot motion planning deals with the design of algorithms that can find collision free paths (if they exist) to take a robot from an initial point to a goal point. Due to recent interests in developing autonomous robotic systems, the subject has become extremely broad and covers not only the traditional areas of finding collision free paths, but automatic assembly, warehouse automation, multi robot cooperation, robotic surgery, etc. The course would cover the fundamental concepts and mathematics required to understand, analyze, and design algorithms required for motion planning of serial robotic arms and mobile robots. After taking this course, students could then take more advanced courses/topics in focused areas like, AI in Motion Planning, unmanned vehicles, probabilistic motion planning, etc. Teachers could use this course to lay the foundation of other courses involving mobile robots like, manufacturing automation, AI, Computer vision applications, etcPRE-REQUISITE :Basic Mathematics : matrices, differential equationsINTENDED AUDIENCE :Students (UG 3rd / 4th year in Mechanical/Electrical/Computer Science/Aerospace engineering), Teachers of engineering colleges, Industry professorial INDUSRTY SUPPORT :All Manufacturing and automation companies (TATA motors, Mahindra, Maruti, Hyundai, GE, GM, etc), IT companies (TCS, Infosys, etc), Amazon, Flipcart, process industries using robotics, aerospace, etc.

Week 1:Introduction to Robot Motion Planning, Basics of Serial robotic arms and Mobile robots, TransformationsWeek 2: Earliest Bug Algorithms, Configuration Space, Manifold, Topology of Configuration SpaceWeek 3: C-Space Obstacles, C-Space for mobile robotsWeek 4: C- Space for Serial robotic armsWeek 5: Road Map methods, Cell decomposition methods, sampling based methodsWeek 6: Potential field based methods, wave front planners.Week 7: Non-holonomic systems and planning with kinematic constraints.Week 8: Motion planning for Multi robotic systems, motion planning in 3D.