Navigation on Density-Unbalanced Terrain

Navigation algorithms have shown to be important in many practical applications. In an unknown or constantly changing environment, D* Lite, a classic dynamic algorithm, replans a shortest path in an efficient manner. However, if there are multiple shortest paths, the D* Lite algorithm arbitrarily selects one. When it comes to a density-unbalanced terrain, the shortest paths with the same cost may have different meaning. The algorithm performance largely depends on how crowded are the areas through which the selected shortest path traverses. In this paper, we propose the densityaware D* Lite algorithm, DAD* Lite, which is capable to take into account crowded areas and avoid them to find a (best) shortest path even when this has more detours than other shortest paths. Experiments show DAD* Lite improves D* Lite by giving better results on successful runs and moving distance.