Mobile Robot Path Planning: an Efficient Distance Computation between Obstacles using Discrete Boundary Model (DBM)

Finding the minimum distance between two obstacles is very crucial for robot path planning and localization, especially for the cleaning and industrial robots. Knowledge of minimum distance is needed for a mobile robot to avoid the obstacles and have the efficient trajectory. This problem has been solved in many different ways. In this paper we present an approach to find the minimum distance between two obstacles that leads to a computationally linear time solution O(pq) in the number of vertices producing minimum number of p and q. The algorithm performs in two phases. Model the obstacle first to build the efficient Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) Tree by generating minimum number of potential points (p and q) to provide the minimum distance and then it finds the required minimum distance using the BVH tree. This method can also handle the case of non-convex objects.