Graph Based Path Planning in Unknown Environments Using Voronoi Diagrams

This work presents a method for online path planning based on graph traversal for autonomous mobile systems. A method using the Voronoi diagrams of obstacle dense areas for efficient planning is proposed. This method creates collision free paths for the vehicle in a receding horizon fashion on a per time-step basis, for environments where no prior map data is available. Simulation results of the proposed method running on a four wheel Ackermann drive vehicle are presented. Furthermore, the method is experimentally shown to produce good results on a custom-made platform in an autonomous circuit-race setting.