High-Speed Environment Representation Scheme for Dynamic Path Planning

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient approach to represent the environment, which can be used to facilitate dynamic path planning in robot navigation systems. The environment is modelled by first defining a ‘virtual rectangle’ to represent an environment that avoids unwanted obstacles. The obstacles within the environment are then represented as convex polygons to generate the required visibility graph. The devised techniques lend well for hardware porting and thus highly suited to high-speed generation of the visibility graph. It has been demonstrated that efficient dynamic path planning can be realised by generating the ‘virtual rectangle’ on the fly such that only the environment needed to facilitate onward traversal can be identified. Finally, the proposed algorithms lend well for high-speed computations as they facilitate a high-degree of parallelism at the architecture level.