Using genetic algorithms for robot motion planning

We present an ongoing research work on robot motion planning using genetic algorithms. Our goal is to use this technique to build fast motion planners for robot with six or more degree of freedom. After a short review of the existing methods, we will introduce the genetic algorithms by showing how they can be used to solve the invers kinematic problem. In the second part of the paper, we show that the path planning problem can be expressed as an optimization problem and thus solved with a genetic algorithm. We illustrate the approach by building a path planner for a planar arm with two degree of freedom, then we demonstrate the validity of the method by planning paths for an holonomic mobile robot. Finally we describe an implementation of the selected genetic algorithm on a massively parallel machine and show that fast planning response is made possible by using this approach.