Robot motion planning using generalised voronoi diagrams

Abstract

In robot motion planning in a space with obstacles, the goal is to find a collision-free path of robot from the starting to the target position. There are many fundamentally different approaches, and their modifications, to the solution of this problem depending on types of obstacles, dimensionality of the space and restrictions for robot movements. Among the most frequently used are roadmap methods (visibility graphs, Voronoi diagrams, rapidly exploring random trees) and methods based on cell decomposition. A common feature of all these methods is the generating of trajectories composed from line segments. In this paper, we will show that generalised Voronoi diagrams can be used for fast generation of smooth paths sufficiently distant from obstacles.