An Efficient Path Planner for Large Mobile Platforms in Cluttered Environments

This paper presents a one step smooth and efficient path planning algorithm for navigating a large robotic platform in known cluttered environments. The proposed strategy, based on the generation of a novel search space, relies on non-uniform density sampling of the free areas to direct the computational resources to troubled and difficult regions, such as narrow passages, leaving the larger open spaces sparsely populated. A smoothing penalty is also associated to the nodes to encourage the generation of gentle paths along the middle of the empty spaces. Collision detection is carried out off-line during the creation of the configuration space to speed up the actual search for the path, which is done on-line. Results prove that the proposed approach considerably reduces the search space in a meaningful and practical manner, improving the computational cost of generating a path optimised for fine and smooth motion