Waypoint

An intermediate point a robot is required to pass through during motion, used to constrain which route it takes.

A waypoint is an intermediate position that a robot is meant to pass through or reach during motion — it can be a set of joint angles, or an end-effector or body pose, sometimes also carrying a desired arrival time and speed. The term comes from ‘waypoints’ in maritime, aviation, and GPS navigation. In robotics, a user or a planner first provides a sequence of waypoints, which trajectory interpolation and time parameterization then connect into a smooth, executable trajectory; the shape between waypoints depends on the interpolation method — a cubic polynomial, for instance, only guarantees continuous velocity, while a B-spline may not pass exactly through each point at all. Mobile-robot navigation and drone missions also commonly describe a route as a sequence of waypoints, and the individual points recorded when teaching an industrial arm are, in essence, waypoints too.

ExampleWhen MoveIt plans a Cartesian path, several end-effector poses are placed in a waypoints list, and computeCartesianPath is called with eef_step = 0.01 — inserting a point every 1 cm; the returned fraction reports how much of the path was successfully planned, with velocity handled separately by time parameterization.

Also called

Via-point, Via Point

Related

Trajectory Interpolation · Trajectory Planning · MoveJ / MoveL · MoveIt Motion Planning Framework · Cubic Spline Interpolation · Navigation

Sources

Lynch & Park, Modern Robotics (2017 preprint), 9.3 Polynomial Via Point Trajectories
MoveIt Docs: Move Group C++ Interface（Cartesian Paths）
Wikipedia: Waypoint