Parallel RRT-based path planning for selective disassembly planning

The planning of disassembly sequences requires the identification of the extraction trajectories of the different parts or assemblies. The failure to find these trajectories can make a planner fail to generate correct sequences or not evaluate potential solutions. In this paper, we analyze the disassembly path-planning problem, its relation to the general path-planning problem and the main differences between both of them, such as the lack of a target configuration. We present a modification of the rapid-growing random tree-based algorithm (RRT) that addresses these differences. RRTs are easily parallelized so we analyze two different parallelization methods using dual-core-based CPUs as well as the impact of the target selection probability of the algorithm in execution time. The method described is applied to several real-world and synthetic examples.