Path Planning for Simple Robots using Soft Subdivision Search

The concept of ε-exact path planning is a theoretically sound alternative to the standard exact algorithms, and provides much stronger guarantees than probabilistic or sampling algorithms. It opens the way for the introduction of soft predicates in the context of subdivision algorithm. Taking a leaf from the great success of the Probabilistic Road Map (PRM) framework, we formulate an analogous framework for subdivision, called Soft Subdivision Search (SSS). In this video, we illustrate the SSS framework for a trio of simple planar robots: disc, triangle and 2-links. These robots have, respectively, 2, 3 and 4 degrees of freedom. Our 2-link robot can also avoid self-crossing. These algorithms operate in realtime and are relatively easy to implement. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F2.2 Geometrical problems and computations, I.2.9 Autonomous vehicles