Path Planning
The Path Planning module is used to determine a route from one coordinate location to another along
a set of waypoints. For example,
if you had an image of a maze and you needed to determine the best path from where the robot is
currently located to where it needs to be you would use the Path Planning module to determine the
shortest or best path to the desired location.
Note that the robot's location is labeled as a circle with an X in it.
Interface
Instructions
1. Robot Location - Specify the start location (X,Y) coordinate of where the robot is currently located. Note that
you can type in variables using [variable_name_x] into these dialog entry boxes. This allows you
to use the RoboRealm application to determine where the robot is visually located and where
the robot needs to go and feed that information into the path planner.
2. Destination - Specify the end location (X,Y) that specify the robots destination.
3. Waypoints - Add in waypoint coordinates that the robot is suggested to go through. Note that if the waypoints
are NOT in a traversable path they will be ignored. The waypoints can either be manually entered using the
provided interface or configured to read the points from a specified variable.
4. Removal Distance - Specify how close the robot need to be to a waypoint (in pixels) before it is
considered traversed and removed from the waypoint target list.
5. Reset - Once all waypoints have been visited you can press the Reset button to
reset all waypoints to a non-visited state.
6. Reset Trigger - You can also select a variable when non-empty will also cause the
reset to trigger. This is handy if you want programmatic control over clearing all
visited waypoints.
7. Path - select "Plot along non-zero pixels" if the current image contains
the path boundaries as non-black pixels. This allows you to restrict the robot
movement to a selected path or line instead of considering all parts of the
image traversable. With this checkbox selected the path planning module operates within the 'white' or
on pixels within an image. Any pixel that is
non-black is considered part of the potential path. Any pixels that are black are considered non-
traversable.
8. Optimal Shortest Path - select this checkbox if you want the system to automatically
determine the optimal shortest path to all waypoints. If this is not selected then waypoints
are visited in the order they appear in the manual waypoints list or in the
waypoint variable. Note that due to the complexity of finding the shortest path only 17
waypoints can be used in this algorithm.
9. Greedy Shortest Path - select to automatically determine a non-optimal but fast shortest
path for more than 17 points. This algorithm selects the next nearest waypoint as the
direction of travel. While not optimal it does work well for most cases.
10. Robot Color - the color marker used to identify the robot (circle with a X)
11. Route Color - the planned route between waypoints
12. Waypoints color - the color of the square that identifies the targeted waypoints
13. Visited color - the color of the waypoints that have already been visited
Example
| Source |
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See the Path Planning tutorial for more information.
Variables
PLAN_ORIENTATION - the suggested direction the robot should move to stay on
the current path. If the robot is NOT currently on the path the
path_direction will be the direction to the nearest point that is on the
path in an attempt to get the robot back on track.
For more information
ACRI: Robot path planning
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