Mission Planning of Mobile Robots and Manipulators for Service Applications v , if k = 0 max i v i = min v max , 0 , if k i 0 k i (9) where, 0 is a constant which depends on the friction between the wheels and the ground, and the gravity constant g . Let R i and R i+1 be two sequential points on R ( s ) . Furthermore, it is assumed that the platform is moving from the point R i to the point R i+1 in an infinitesimal time t i , and E i is the cor- responding displacement along R ( s ) . The average velocity of the platform during this period is represented by v i . The travel time t i from point R i to point R i+1 is given by: The minimization of problem (12) with respect to the control points p i leads to a collision-free path for the platform, which satisfies all the re- quirements. The above approach generates for the platform its schedule, the path R ( s ) and the ve- locity v ( s ) simultaneously satisfying that: (a) the platform is moving within the maximum allowed velocity, (b) the platform will not collide with the static obstacles, (c) each work station will be served only once, and (d) the lengths of gener- ated path are the shortest possible. DETERMINING AN OPTIMUM PATH IN STATIC ENVIRONMENT Genetic Algorithms (GAs) have been success- fully applied to optimization problems with large and complex search spaces due to their ability of reaching a global near-optimal solution even if