A Path Planning Method For Overhead Crane Based on Spatial Stratification

Abstract

The automatic operation and obstacle avoidance for overhead crane in special environments is an urgent problem to be solved in the field of unmanned and intelligent factory. At present, the path planning problem for overhead crane is mostly based on 2D path planning method, and the research theory of spatial path planning is still immature. In this paper, a novel spatial path planning method is proposed for the lifting process of overhead crane, a factory space which containing obstacles is layered in the vertical direction, and the ant colony algorithm is used to calculate the path trajectory of each layer, then the optimal path can be determined through the evaluation indexes: running time, available energy and collision risk(represented by the turning point). Finally, the rationality and feasibility of the spatial path planning method proposed in this paper is verified by numerical examples.