Clearance based path optimization for motion planning

Many motion planning techniques, like the probabilistic roadmap method (PRM), generate low quality paths. In this paper, we study a number of different quality criteria on paths in particular length and clearance. We describe a number of techniques to improve the quality of paths. These are based on a new approach to increase the path clearance. Experiments showed that the heuristics were able to generate paths of a much higher quality than previous approaches.

I. Introduction

Motion 'planning can be defined as finding a path for an object from a start to a goal configuration without colliding with obstacles in the environment. It has been used in many fields such as mobile robots [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], manipulation planning [6], [7], [8], [9], CAD systems [10] virtual environments [11], protein folding [12] and humanoid robot planning [13].