Fast Path Computation using Lattices in the Sensor-Space for Forest Navigation

Abstract

Fast autonomous motion in cluttered and unknown environments, such as forests, is highly dependent on low-latency obstacle avoidance strategies. In this context, this paper presents a motion planning strategy that relies on lattices for the fast computation of local paths that both avoid obstacles and follow a vector field that encodes the global robot task. Lattices are constructed in the sensor space and represent a set of search trees that can be quickly pruned in function of the detected obstacles. The remaining lattice trees are used to optimize a vector field-dependent functional, thus generating the best free local path that tracks the field. To illustrate the proposed approach, we present simulation and real-world experiments of a planar robot moving in a cluttered, forest-like environment.