Jump Point Search with Temporal Obstacles

Abstract

In 4-connected grid-based path planning one often needs to account for temporal and moving obstacles: ones that appear, disappear and which can prevent the agent from reaching its target. Such problems are common in a variety of settings (games, robotics etc.) and they can be surprisingly challenging to solve. First, because the temporal aspect increases the size of the search space; second because the search space contains many symmetric paths, indistinguishable from one another except by the order in which grid moves appear. To tackle such problems we consider a new optimal algorithm – in the style of Jump Point Search – which can identify and break these symmetries and thus improves performance; from several factors to more than one order of magnitude vs. SIPP, arguably the gold standard baseline in the area.