Sculpting potential fields in the BVP Path Planner

BVP Path Planners generate potential fields whose gradient descent represents navigational routes from any point of the environment to a goal position. The resulting trajectories are smooth and free of local minima. In this paper, we refine our BVP PP approach by introducing a novel form for the core equation that permits to easily cope with terrain inhomogeneities. This is accomplished by changing locally the concavity/convexity of the potential, and then creating regions with higher or lower traveling preferences. We present analytical results and simulated experiments to demonstrate our proposal.