Path Planning in a Dynamic Environment

Path planning is an important area in the control of autonomous mobile robots. Recent work has focused on aspects reductions in processing time than the memory requirements. A dynamic environment uses a lot of memory and hence the processing time increases too. Our approach is to reduce the processing time by the use of a pictorial approach to reduce the number of data used. In this paper, we present a path planning approach that operates in three steps. First, a construction of the visibility tree is performed. The following treatments are not performed on the original image but on the result tree whose elements are specific points of the environment linked by the relationship of visibility. We construct thereafter a visibility graph which one seeks the shortest path. This approach has a great interest because of its fast execution speed. The path search is extended also for the case where obstacles can move. The moving obstacles may be other mobile robots whose trajectories and speeds are known initially. At the end, some applications are provided on solving similar problem such civil aviation in order to guide plane avoiding collisions. Keywords—component; path planning; navigation; robotics; visibility graph; obstacles contours; moving obstacles; space-time representation