Algorithmic Foundation of Robotics VIII

Abstract

In this paper we study the problem of path planning among movable obstacles, in which a robot is allowed to move the obstacles\r if they block the robot’s way from a start to a goal position. We make the observation that we can decouple the computations\r of the robot motions and the obstacle movements, and present a probabilistically\r complete algorithm, something which to date has not been achieved for this problem. Our algorithm maintains an explicit representation\r of the robot’s configuration space. We present an efficient implementation for the case of planar, axis-aligned environments\r and report experimental results on challenging scenarios.