Cellular automata-based collision-free robot path planning

Abstract

This paper presents a new parallel algorithm for collision-free path planning of a diamond-shaped robot among arbitrarily-shaped obstacles and its implementation in VLSI. The proposed algorithm is based on the computational geometry concept known as the "Voronoi diagram", which is constructed through the time evolution of Cellular Automata, after an initial phase during which the boundaries of obstacles are identified and coded with respect to their orientation.