Path Planning in a 3-D Environment using an Octree and a Potential Field.

Abstract

We propose an efficient and simple method for finding a collision-free path and orientation for a rigid robot in a 3-D environment for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) . The method uses an octree for representing every object (robot and static/dynamic obstacles) in the environment without any distinction of the movability of objects; therefore, all objects are dealt with in the same way. The path of a robot from its starting position to the given goal with arbitrary motion (i.e., translation and rotation) in a 3-D environment is efficiently searched for in successive adjoining regions (octree white nodes) by using the potential field generated from each black node of the octree. The algorithm is simple, so it can easily be accelerated by using parallelization techniques. Experimental results obtained under several conditions are reported, and finally, the efficiency of the proposed method against the complexity of the environment are discussed.