Hierarchical A∗ based path planning — a case study

摘要

Usually it is impossible to know in advance how coarsely robot movements can be discretized in order to find a collision-free path from an initial robot position to a desired goal position in a presence of obstacles. Our solution to the problem is to introduce a new method of constructing hierarchical path planning algorithms. It is based on a novel application of the A∗ control strategy, called here Meta A∗.We test four hierarchical path planning algorithms, two of which are based on Meta A∗, using five simulated robot workcells. The simulations suggest that the Meta A∗ based planners, on average, find paths faster and consume less memory than the other two algorithms.