University of Notre Dame
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

AME 469: Introduction to Robotics
Homework 9

B. Goodwine
Spring, 2001		 Issued: April 30, 2001
Due: May 2, 2001

The purpose of this homework is to investigate the efficacy of the potential function motion planning algorithm and the wavefront expansion algorithm motion planning methods. Sample Matlab code for the potential function approach and the wavefront approach are available.

Download the two programs and change the geometry and location of the two objects and add a third object. Using 3 different combinations of starting and ending points, run the programs to see if they successfully generate a path from the starting configuration to the goal configuration. Find at least one case that work and one case that does not work for the potential function approach. In each case, the trajectory much be such that the path is altered by the presence of at least two of the obstacles. Is it the case that the wavefront expansion always works?

Last updated: April 23, 1999.
B. Goodwine (jgoodwin@nd.edu)