title: Find a free direction in a pointcloud
body: <p>in my setup I have a depth camera looking down on the box. There is one object which should be moved (red rectangle) and obstacles (black things). I need to find a free direction to move the object there on the certain distance (1 m lets say). I have the point cloud of the scene and the transformation between the camera and the ground plane. My idea was to reduce the pointcloud to 2 dimensions, build some sort of occupancy map and try to build a free line pixel by pixel from the objects center with lets say 5 degrees step clockwise. However, I feel that its a too complicated aproach for such task. Is there any simplier solution? Otherwise, how could I take in account objects size? Just add half of the biggest object`s dimesion to each obstacle? But in this case it will consume a lot of safe space as well, because the object is not symmetrical. I use python so any library suggestion would also be very helpful. Thanks!</p>
  <p>Setup:
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/WjxFL.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://i.stack.imgur.com/WjxFL.png</a></p>