Hybrid Motion Planning Using Minkowski Sums

Probabilistic and deterministic planners are two major approximate-based frameworks for solving motion planning problems. Both approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages. In this work, we provide an investigation to the following question: Is there a planner that can take the advantages from both probabilistic and deterministic planners? Our strategy to achieve this goal is to use the point-based Minkowski sum of the robot and the obstacles in workspace. Our experimental results show that our new method, called Msum planner, which uses the geometric properties of Minkowski sum to solve motion planning problems, provides advantages over existing probabilistic or deterministic planners. In particular, Msum planner is significantly more efficient than the Probabilistic Roadmap Methods (PRMs) and its variants for problems that can be solved by reusing configurations.