Heavy mobile crane lift path planning in congested modular industrial plants using a robotics approach

Lift path planning is a significant subtask in constructability analysis, sequencing, and scheduling of congested industrial modular projects, impacting project cost, and safety. Although intuitive lift planning is still prevalent among the practitioners, this manual process might be tedious and error-prone for hundreds of lifts. This research presents an automated lift path planning method for heavy crawler cranes in no-walk scenarios employing a robotics approach. This method treats the lifted object as a three-degree-of-freedom convex mobile robot with discretized rotational and continuous translational motions. The proposed resolution-complete method models the crane capacity chart, tail-swing, and boom clearances as pseudo-obstacles in the lifted object's configuration space. By reducing the lift path planning to a graph search problem, if any, the shortest path for the planar motion of the heavy-lift, along with its optimal pick-point, is identified. The developed heavy-lift path planning method is validated via two practical case studies. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.