Roadmap Methods

Abstract

In this chapter we describe a first approach to robot path planning which we name the roadmap approach. This approach is based on the following general idea: capture the connectivity of the robot’s free space C free in the form of a network of one-dimensional curves — the roadmap — lying in C free or its closure cl(C free ). Once constructed, a roadmap R is used as a set of standardized paths. Path planning is reduced to connecting the initial and goal configurations to R, and searching R for a path.