Motion planning amidst planar moving obstacles

A method is investigated for finding a collision-free path for a mobile robot with a few degrees of freedom in a time-varying domain. The environment contains a set of obstacles with arbitrary known motion patterns. In a time-varying environment, paths are time-dependent, i.e., a path needs to be specified as a function of time, since connectivity in the environment changes over time. Given a time-varying environment, a start time, and a start location, a method is presented for finding a collision-free path from start to goal points for a finite-size robot subject to a speed bound. Our method makes use of a heuristic approach based on a transient pixel representation