Here you can get a more overall picture on motion planning:
Motion Planning Research at Texas A&M

Here an overview of the Haptic-Aided Motion Planning Research Haptic Interaction in Motion Planning

Here a link to my final research paper

In summary my research deals with using human input to solve motion planning problems. I will be doing work on virtual scenes where a multi-dimensional space with obstacles is presented, and the goal is to move a robot from an initial configuration to a goal configuration. For such problem we will use the haptic devise PhantoM from SensAble Technologies, Inc.; that will be used as an interface for a human operator to move the robot through the scence trying to minimize the number of collisions with the presented obstacles. Then we are going to use several methods to convert these paths created by the operator to collision-free paths. I will particularly work on creating algorithms to modify these paths and test their performance. The goal is to optimize the process.

Project Abstract

In this project we explore the use of path modi.cation methods to help solve motion planning problems. We de.ne path modi.cation as the process of modifying the order and position of the di.erent nodes in a path with the purpose of improving it. These path modi.cation methods are used as a complementary piece to aid the algorithms used to plan the motion of an object. For a certain motion planning problem an approximate path can be built by using di.erent possible motion planning methods as Probabilistic Roadmap Methods (PRM) or User Aided Motion Planning Methods. But this approximate path returned by the motion planners might still have room for optimization. The path modi.cation methods explored in this paper aspire to aid in the optimization of these paths. We de.ne the di.erent steps present in the process of path modi.cation, and we investigate di.erent implementations of these steps.