A fast path planning by path graph optimization

In this paper, a fast path planning method by optimization of a path graph for both efficiency and accuracy is proposed. A conventional quadtree-based path planning approach is simple, robust, and efficient. However, it has two limitations. The first limitation is that many small cells are required to represent obstacles because the positions and shapes of the cells are not object-dependent and searching the shortest path in the path graph is slow. The second limitation is generation of nonoptimal paths due to large cells in a free space. The cost of traversing a cell is the same whether a path just clips a corner of the cell or actually passes through the entire width of the cell. The quadtree is very sensitive to obstacle placement and the error factor is proportional to the size of the cell. We propose a path graph optimization technique employing a compact mesh representation. A world space is triangulated into a base mesh and the base mesh is simplified to a compact mesh. The compact mesh representation is object-dependent; the positions of vertexes of the mesh are optimized according to the curvatures of the obstacles. The compact mesh represents the obstacles as accurately as the quadtree even though using much fewer vertexes than the quadtree. The compact mesh distributes vertexes in a free space in a balanced way by ensuring that the lengths of edges are below an edge length threshold. An optimized path graph is extracted from the compact mesh. An iterative vertex pushing method is proposed to include important obstacle boundary edges in the path graph. Dijkstra’s shortest path searching algorithm is used to search the shortest path in the path graph. Experimental results show that the path planning using the optimized path graph is an order of magnitude faster than the quadtree approach while the length of the path generated by the proposed method is almost the same as that of the path generated by the quadtree.