Optimal path planning using equilateral spaces oriented visibility graph method

Abstract

Path planning has been an important aspect in the development of autonomous cars in which path planning is used to find a collision-free path for the car to traverse from a starting point Sp to a target point Tp. The main criteria for a good path planning algorithm include the capability of producing the shortest path with a low computation time. Low computation time makes the autonomous car able to re-plan a new collision-free path to avoid accident. However, the main problem with most path planning methods is their computation time increases as the number of obstacles in the environment increases. In this paper, an algorithm based on visibility graph (VG) is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, which is called Equilateral Space Oriented Visibility Graph (ESOVG), the number of obstacles considered for path planning is reduced by introducing a space in which the obstacles lie. This means the obstacles located outside the space are ignored for path planning. From simulation, the proposed algorithm has an improvement rate of up to 90% when compared to VG. This makes the algorithm is suitable to be applied in real-time and will greatly accelerate the development of autonomous cars in the near future.