Elliptic net - a path planning algorithm for dynamic environments

Robot path planning and obstacle avoidance problems play an important role in mobile robotics. The standard algorithms assume that a working environment is static or changing slowly. Moreover, computation time and time needed for realization of the planned path is usually not crucial. The paper describes a novel algorithm that is focused especially to deal with these two issues: the presented algorithm Elliptic Net is fast and robust and therefore usable in highly dynamic environments. The main idea of the algorithm is to cover an interesting part of the working environment by a set of nodes and to construct a graph where the nodes are connected by edges. Weights of the edges are then determined according to their lengths and distance to obstacles. This allows to choose whether a generated path will be safe (far from obstacles), short, or weigh these two criterions. The Elliptic Net approach was implemented, experimentally verified, and compared with standard path planning algorithms.