Adaptive node sampling method for probabilistic roadmap planners

Abstract

This paper proposes an adaptive node sampling method for the probabilistic roadmap (PRM) planner. The proposed method substitutes the random sampling in the learning phase of the PRM planner and improves the configuration of the roadmap. This method uses two phase to determine nodes in order to construct the roadmap. First, the proposed method extracts initial nodes using the approximated cell decomposition and the Harris corner detector. Second, the positions of these nodes are optimized using a construction process of the centroidal voronoi tessellation (CVT). The proposed method determines the adequate number and positions of the nodes to represent the entire free space, and the PRM planner based on the proposed method finds out efficient paths even in narrow passages. These properties have been verified though experiments.