The "Ariadne's clew" algorithm: global planning with local methods

Abstract

The goal of the work described is to build a path planner able to drive a robot in a dynamic environment where the obstacles are moving. In order to do so, the authors propose a method, called Ariadne's clew algorithm, to build a global path planner based on the combination of two local planning algorithms: an explore algorithm and a search algorithm. The purpose of the explore algorithm is to collect information about the environment with an increasingly fine resolution by placing landmarks in the searched space. The goal of the search algorithm is to opportunistically check if the target can be easily reached from any given placed landmark. The Ariadne's clew algorithm is shown to be very fast is most cases, allowing planning in dynamic environment. It is shown to be complete, which means that it is sure to find a path when one exists. A massively parallel implementation of this algorithm is described.