Basic algorithms for space structuring in path planning for mobile robots

The authors introduce space structuring based on the applicability of different path planning methods as a promising way to improve efficiency in mobile robot path planning. They present a preprocessing of the environment populated with simple polygonal obstacles aimed at the early discovery of a collision-free path for a mobile robot among obstacles between a start configuration and a goal configuration in cluttered environments, prior to the application of a path planning method. The preprocessing is done only once for one robot and one environment. Space structuring is based on obstacle growing with circles relative to the robot. Experimental results show the practicality of the method