DW-A-PRM: A Dynamic Weighted Planner

Abstract

Robot path planning plays a pivotal role in enabling autonomous systems to navigate safely and efficiently in complex and uncertain environments. Despite extensive research on classical graph-based methods and sampling-based planners, achieving an optimal balance between global optimality, computational efficiency, and adaptability to dynamic environments remains an open challenge. To address this issue, this paper proposes a hybrid path planning framework, which integrates heuristic-driven search with probabilistic roadmap construction under a dynamic weighting scheme. By coupling the global guidance of A* with the stochastic exploration of PRM, the method achieves a synergistic balance between search optimality and computational tractability. Comprehensive experiments in diverse simulated environments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently yields smoother and shorter paths while significantly reducing computational overhead compared with conventional approach and other hybrid planners. These results highlight the potential of the proposed framework as an effective and generalizable solution for real-time robotic navigation in complex environments.