this paper we consider an obstacle-based prm

We introduce the notion of expansiveness to characterize a family of robot configuration spaces whose connectivity can be effectively captured by a roadmap of randomly-sampled milestones. The analysis of expansive configuration spaces has inspired us to develop a new randomized planning algorithm. This algorithm tries to sample only the portion of the configuration space that is relevant to the current query, avoiding the cost of precomputing a roadmap for the entire configuration space. Thus, it is well-suited for problems where a single query is submitted for a given environment. The algorithm has been implemented and successfully applied to complex assembly maintainability problems from the automotive industry.

this paper, which presents randomized, algorithmic techniques for path planning that are particular suited for problems that involve dierential constraints.

We introduce the concept of a Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) as a randomized data structure that is designed for a broad class of path planning problems. While they share many of the beneficial properties of existing randomized planning techniques, RRTs are specifically designed to handle nonholonomic constraints (including dynamics) and high degrees of freedom. An RRT is iteratively expanded by applying control inputs that drive the system slightly toward randomly-selected points, as opposed to requiring point-to-point convergence, as in the probabilistic roadmap approach. Several desirable properties and a basic implementation of RRTs are discussed. To date, we have successfully applied RRTs to holonomic, nonholonomic, and kinodynamic planning problems of up to twelve degrees of freedom.

We present a randomized motion planner for robots that must avoid moving obstacles and achieve a specified goal under kinematic and dynamic constraints. The planner samples the robot's statetime space by picking control inputs at random and integrating the equations of motion. The result is a roadmap of sampled statetime points, called milestones, connected by short admissible trajectories. The planner does not precompute the roadmap as traditional probabilistic roadmap planners do; instead, for each planning query, it generates a new roadmap to find a trajectory between an initial and a goal statetime point. We prove in this paper that the probability that the planner fails to find such a trajectory when one exists quickly goes to 0, as the number of milestones grows. The planner has been implemented and tested successfully in both simulated and real environments. In the latter case, a vision module estimates obstacle motions just before planning starts; the planner is then allocated a small, fixed amount of time to compute a trajectory. If a change in the obstacle motion is detected while the robot executes the planned trajectory, the planner recomputes a trajectory on the fly. 1

... This paper provides foundations for understanding the effect of passages on the connectedness of probabilistic roadmaps. It also proposes a new random sampling scheme for finding such passages. An initial roadmap is built in a "dilated" free space allowing some penetration distance of the robot into the obstacles. This roadmap is then modified by resampling around the links that do not lie in the true free space. Experiments show that this strategy allows relatively small roadmaps to reliably capture the free space connectivity

Probabilistic roadmap planning methods have been shown to perform well in a number of practical situations, but their performance degrades when paths are required to pass through narrow passages in the free space. We propose a new method of sampling the configuration space in which randomly generated configurations, free or not, are retracted onto the medial axis of the free space. We give algorithms that perform this retraction while avoiding explicit computation of the medial axis, and we show that sampling and retracting in this manner increases the number of nodes found in small volume corridors in a way that is independent of the volume of the corridor and depends only on the characteristics of the obstacles bounding it. Theoretical and experimental results are given to show that this improves performance on problems requiring traversal of narrow passages. 1

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We propose a combinatorial approach to plan noncolliding motions for a planar robot arm. The approach works even with certain types of movable polygonal obstacles and flexible polygonal fences. This yields a very efficient deterministic algorithm for a category of robot arm motion planning problems with many degrees of freedom, for which the known general roadmap techniques have exponential complexity. The main result is an efficient algorithm for convexifying a simple (open or closed) polygonal path with rigid non-intersecting motions in the plane. It works by computing in O(n²) time a monotone mechanism with one degree of freedom, whose motion is controlled by the rotation of a single edge around one of its endpoints. As it moves, all the interdistances between pairs of points not joined by a bar are nondecreasing, thus guaranteeing non-collision. At most O(n²) such motions suffice to reach a convex configuration of the original linkage. At each step, recomputing the next motion from ...

We present, implement, and analyze a spectrum of closely-related planners, designed to gain insight into the relationship between classical grid search and probabilistic roadmaps (PRMs). Building on the quasi-Monte Carlo sampling literature, we have developed deterministic variants of the PRM that use low-discrepancy and low-dispersion samples, including lattices. Classical grid search is extended using subsampling for collision detection and also the dispersion-optimal Sukharev grid, which can be considered as a kind of lattice-based roadmap to complete the spectrum. Our experimental results show that the deterministic variants of the PRM offer performance advantages in comparison to the original, multiple-query PRM and the single-query, Lazy PRM. Surprisingly, even some forms of grid search yield performance that is comparable to the original PRM. Our theoretical analysis shows that all of our deterministic PRM variants are resolution complete and achieve the best possible asymptotic convergence rate, which is shown to be superior to that obtained by random sampling. Thus, in surprising contrast to recent trends, there is both experimental and theoretical evidence that the randomization used in the original PRM is not advantageous.