Some Experimental Results Using Heuristics for Solving the Find-Path Problem in C-Space

Abstract

The problem of moving a rigid planar body in a 2D environment with fixed obstacles is discussed. In spite of being a simple instance of the general find-path problem, the computational complexity of the existing algorithms to solve it are still too high for practical purposes. A new approach improving the efficiency of the solution to this problem, when viewed as a search problem in configuration space, is introduced. It is based on the use of a reduced model of the connectivity of free-space to globally guide the search process towards the more promising directions in configuration space. The search time savings obtained when using this heuristic are shown to be important and justify its interest for real time applications. Some examples comparing the efficiency of classical search methods with the efficiency of the proposed search procedure are included.