Can you define minimum separation distance to obstacles for robotics toolbox Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) path planner?

I am using the robotics toolbox and working with a obstacle-heavy environment for path planning. For safety reasons, I would like to specify the minimum separation distance from any object in a valid path of the robotic arm to be some value around 10 cm. I know I can plan a collision free path with the rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) and then later validate using checkCollision that a given path has a minimum separation distance with all obstacles, but is there a way to enforce this constraint in the RRT algorithm? Checking hundreds of RRT paths and then rejecting them to be run again if they violate the separation condition takes too long to be viable. Should I just inflate the STL scales so that this condition is incorporated into the RRT algorithm by redefining what it means to collide?

Answer 1

[Karsh Tharyani]

Hi Connor,

You can try overriding the "isStateValid" routine of a "manipulatorCollisionBodyValidator" by subclassing from it. Your overriden "isStateValid" in your subclass could perform "collisionChecking", evaluate the sepration distance, and if within acceptable threshold, accept or reject a state.

Refer to a pattern, which overrides the "interpolate" for a "manipulatorStateSpace", in this example: https://www.mathworks.com/help/robotics/ug/plan-paths-with-end-effector-constraints.html

I hope this helps.

Karsh

[yovel atia]

Hi, did you manage to define a minimum distance from obstacles? If so, can you share how?