Towards incremental A-r-Star

Abstract

Graph search based path planning is popular in mobile robot applications and video game programming. Previously, we developed the A-r-Star pathfinder, a suboptimal variant of the A-Star pathfinder with performance that scales linearly with increasing the resolution (size) and hence sparseness of the grid map of a given continuous world. This paper presents the study of the direct acyclic graph (tree structure) formed by the A-r-Star and outlines steps to developing an incremental version of the A-r-Star. The incremental version of A-r-Star is able to replan faster using information from previous searches to speed up subsequent searches. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.