Path Planning for Autonomous Mobile Robots Using the Boundary Integral Equation Method

Path planning is a fundamental problem in mobile robotics. The objective of path planning is to find a sequence of states that carries a robot from some start state to the goal while avoiding obstacles. This paper focuses on point-to-point path planning, ie., developing a path between given points in a known environment with obstacles. A novel environment representation method is introduced which utilizes the Boundary Integral Equation (BIE) method to map the environment into continuous Harmonic potential fields. Different mappings and mechanisms for utilizing these mappings for path planning are developed, and a collection of path planning algorithms are described which exploit the properties of Harmonic fields and the computational efficiency of the BIE method.