Design And Implementation Of Segmented Path Planning Algorithm Of Crawler Crane

Scheme designing and path planning for the crawler crane play an important role in hoisting important equipment in construction site for safety and efficiency. In the process of lifting scheme design, engineers need to consider the crane’s path at the construction site, if the environment is complex, crane has weak abilities through obstacles, it is difficult to find a no touch and reasonable path by manual calculations.Crawler crane path planning problem is a high-dimensional constrained path planning problem, currently there is no efficient algorithm to solve crane path planning problem, it is still mainly relied on the engineer’s experience in the engineering practice and manual calculations to determine crane’s path in practice.With the development of virtual simulation technology, hoisting industry also began to accelerated its design process by simulation software, there have been many planning algorithm based on virtual simulation environment. The present crane path planning algorithm does not consider walking, because it will greatly increase the difficulty of path planning, not only in the increase of three dimensions in the C space, but introducing nonlinear constraints as well.This paper summarized the existing algorithm and analysis the problem considering the characteristics of the crawler crane’s motion and the working site, a segmented path planning algorithm has been designed and implemented by decoupling the dimensions of the upper crane and the below crane. The first stage only deals with the crane movement through using the navigation mesh to describe the underlying search space, and using the A*algorithm for path finding, funnel algorithm for modification. The second stage plans the upper crane’s actions using the variant RRT algorithm to adapt to the local path planning. This newly proposed algorithm can produce a high quality path in short time.A path planning system have been developed on the basis of the proposed algorithm and integrated it into the lifting simulation software as a sub-module, it greatly enhances the market competitiveness of the software.