A General Approach to Path Planning Within C-Space Safe Corridors

Abstract

This letter presents a novel strategy for collision-free path planning in robotic manipulators. The method operates in two stages: first, a sampling-based exploration of the configuration space is performed to construct a safe corridor composed of axis-aligned bounding boxes. Within this corridor, an optimisation-based trajectory generation phase addresses the channel problem by computing smooth joint trajectories as non-rational splines. A multi-objective cost function is minimised to reduce geometric acceleration along the path, while also maximising the distance from obstacles to improve safety margins. The proposed algorithm is general and applicable to a wide range of kinematic structures, and supports user-defined path degree and geometric continuity. Simulation results demonstrate superior performance compared to existing methods, and experimental validation further confirms its practical effectiveness. Our implementation is open-sourced and available on Github.