Solving the find-path problem: a complete and less complex approach using the BIE methodology

Abstract

Although significant progress has been made in the area of robot motion planning, many issues still need to be addressed. These include the computational complexity of navigation algorithms, their adaptability to different environments, and their sensitivity to changes in the environment. By capitalizing on the known properties of harmonic potential functions, this work develops a new approach towards model-based path planning which is intuitive, complete (goal attainability is guaranteed), free from local traps (local minima) and computationally less complex than many existing methods. Extending the advantages of hill-climbing method, which have low space and time complexity, to a global (model-based) path planning algorithm marks one of the major contributions of this work. Furthermore, the algorithm presented here is able to handle arbitrary geometries and does not require a geometrical or topological approximation at the environment representation level.