Hierarchical Planning With Annotated Skeleton Guidance

Abstract

We present a hierarchical skeleton-guided motion planning algorithm to guide mobile robots. A good skeleton maps the connectivity of the subspace of c-space containing significant degrees of freedom and is able to guide the planner to find the desired solutions fast. However, sometimes the skeleton does not closely represent the free c-space, which often misleads current skeleton-guided planners. The hierarchical skeleton-guided planning strategy gradually relaxes its reliance on the workspace skeleton as <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {C}_{space}$</tex-math></inline-formula> is sampled, thereby incrementally returning a sub-optimal path, a feature that is not guaranteed in the standard skeleton-guided algorithm. Experimental comparisons to the standard skeleton guided planners and other lazy planning strategies show significant improvement in roadmap construction run time while maintaining path quality for multi-query problems in cluttered environments.