Efficient Collision Detection Oriented Motion Primitives for Path Planning

Mobile robots in dynamic environments require fast planning, especially when onboard computational resources are limited. While classic potential field based algorithms may suffice in simple scenarios, in most cases algorithms able to escape local minima are necessary. Configuration-space search algorithms have proven to provide a good trade-off between quality of the solutions and search time. Literature presents a wide variety of approaches that speed up this search by reducing the number of edges that need to be inspected. Much less attention was instead given to reducing the time necessary to evaluate the cost of a single edge. This paper addresses this point by associating edges to motion primitives that prioritize fast collision detection. We show how biarcs can be used as motion primitives that enable fast collision detection, while still providing smooth, tangent continuous paths. The proposed approach does not assume a disc shaped hitbox, making it appealing for all robots with very different width and length or for differential drive robots with active wheels located far from the robot's center.