Motion planning of a robot storing a discretized environment on one or more processors and improved operation of same

A method of operation of a processor-based robot control system that employs a plurality of planning graphs stored to a nontransitory storage during a pre-run time period, each planning graph respectively comprising a plurality of nodes connected by a plurality of edges, each node which represents, implicitly or explicitly, variables that characterize a respective state of the first robot in a configuration space of the first robot, and each edge which represents a transition between a respective pair of the states of the first robot, where the respective pair of states is represented by a respective ones of a pair of nodes that are coupled by a respective edge in the respective planning graph, the method comprising:

• for a first planning graph of the plurality of planning graphs,
• accessing the first planning graph that was stored to the nontransitory storage during the pre-run time period;
• for each of a plurality of edges of the first planning graph, performing, by the robot control system, collision checking for collisions between a discretized representation of a swept volume associated with the edge and a discretized representation of any obstacles in an environment in which the robot will operate;
• updating, by the robot control system, the first planning graph based on the collision checking;
• performing, by the robot control system, an optimization of the updated first planning graph to identify one or more optimized results, if any, from the updated first planning graph;
• determining, by the robot control system, whether the one or more optimized results, if any, from the updated first planning graph meets a satisfaction condition;
• in response to determining that the optimized result does not meet the satisfaction condition:
• accessing the second planning graph that was stored to the nontransitory storage during the pre-run time period;
• for each of a plurality of edges of the second planning graph, performing, by the robot control system, collision checking for collisions between a discretized representation of a swept volume associated with the edge and a discretized representation of any obstacles in an environment in which the robot will operate,
• updating, by the robot control system, the second planning graph based on the collision checking;
• performing, by the robot control system, an optimization of the updated second planning graph to identify one or more optimized results, if any, from the updated second planning graph;
• and
• controlling the first robot using one of the updated planning graphs during a run time period.