Compact Reachability Map for Excavator Motion Planning In this paper, we propose a novel compact reachability map representation for excavator motion planning. The constructed reachability map can concisely encode the bucketxe2x80x99s reachable pose and the translation capability limited by excavatorxe2x80x99s kinematic structure. By explicitly exploiting the property that the basic excavation motion lies on the excavation plane determined by excavator links, we further reduce the construction of the map from 3D Euclidean space to 2D excavation plane. We show the precomputed reachability map can be used to develop new excavator motion planning approach. By indexing on the precomputed reachability map, we can efficiently compute the feasible fullbucket trajectory for single step excavation operation. We highlight the results of the reachability map construction and demonstrate the simulation results of motion planning using a commercial dynamic simulator.

WholeBody Motion Planning for Walking Excavators This article presents a trajectory planning framework for allterrain vehicles with legs and wheels such as walking excavators. Our formulation takes into account the whole body of the robot while computing the plans for locomotion. Hence, we can produce motion plans over the rough terrain that would be hard to plan without considering all Degrees of Freedom (DoF) simultaneously. Our planner can also optimize over the contact schedule for all limbs, thereby finding the feasible motions even for the infeasible initial contact schedule. Furthermore, we introduce a novel formulation of the support area constraint. We generate plans for a Menzi Muck M545, a 31 DoF walking excavator with five limbs: four wheeled legs and an arm. We show motion plans for traversing a variety of terrains that require wholebody planning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses motion planning in rough terrain for vehicles with legs and wheels.