Relaxation of roadmap methods of robot motion planning

Abstract

In robot motion planning a robot should pass around the obstacles, from a given starting position to a given target position, touching none of them, i.e. the goal is to find a collision-free path from the starting to the target position. This task has many specific formulations depending on the shape of obstacles, allowable directions of movements, knowledge of the scene, etc. Research on path planning has yielded many fundamentally different approaches to its solution that can be classified as roadmap methods (visibility graph method, Voronoi diagram) and methods based on cell decomposition. In this work, an approach based on Voronoi diagrams is proposed, considering point, straight line and polygonal obstacles in a completely known scene. Approximating polygonal obstacles by sets of points makes it possible to apply roadmap methods to more complex problems.