Lift path planning for tower cranes based on environmental point clouds: Fid-Bau Portal

Lift path planning for tower cranes based on environmental point clouds

Lin, Xiao / Han, Yu / Guo, Hongling / Luo, Zhubang / Guo, Ziyang

Abstract The planning of lift paths is a critical task in crane operations. Traditionally, crane operators and assistants perform operation tasks based on their observation and experience, this is a tedious and error-prone process. Previous studies mainly focus on the optimization of path length or planning time, but seldom consider the accessibility of information for planning and the execution ability of crane operators. As a result, existing solutions may not be suitable for lifting practices due to the ideal validation environment. To address the gap, this research proposes an automated lift path planning method for tower cranes based on environmental point clouds. The method utilizes an octree-based sampling strategy to generate a roadmap from point clouds in the configuration space and a novel collision checking method for point clouds. Furthermore, an optimized A* algorithm is employed to identify executable paths. The proposed method is validated using real point clouds from a construction site. The result shows that the method can automatically generate more executable paths with higher efficiency only using point cloud data. Specifically, the proposed method reduces searching time, path length and the number of inflection points by 57%, 50% and 40% respectively, when compared to the RRT algorithm.

Highlights • Lift path planning is a critical task for tower crane operations. • Lift paths automatically generated by existing methods lack executability. • An automated lift path planning method based on point clouds is proposed. • It is shown that the method can generate more executable paths with higher efficiency.