一般的形状の障害物が存在する環境における移動ロボットの経路計画法

抄録

This paper proposes a tangent graph, which is defined on the basis of a new concept“local shortest path”, for path planning of a point robot in environments, where there exist not only polygonal obstacles but also curved obstacles. The local shortest path is defined as a path which is the shortest in its neighboring region, and on the basis of this concept a collision-free path can be planned by selecting common tangents of the obstacles. In the tangent graph, a node corresponds to a tangent point on obstacle boundaries, and an edge represents a collision-free common tangent of obstacles or a boundary segment between two tangent points on the same boundary.
The. tangent graph has the same data structure with the visibility graph but it has less edges than its corresponding visibility graph. When the number of convex segments of obstacle boundaries is denoted by K, the tangent graph requires O (K²) memory for an environment with curved obstacles. For a polygonal environment, the size of the data structure is O (M²+N) , where M and N denote the numbers of convex components and convex vertices of the obstacles. The tangent graph can be used to plan a collision-free path not only among polygonal obstacles but also among curved obstacles, whereas the visibility graph is limited to a polygonal environment.