Efficient sampling-based approaches to optimal path planning in complex cost spaces

Abstract

Sampling-based algorithms for path planning have achieved great success during the last 15 years, thanks to their ability to efficiently solve complex highdimensional problems. However, standard versions of these algorithms cannot guarantee optimality or even high-quality for the produced paths. In recent years, variants of these methods, taking cost criteria into account during the exploration process, have been proposed to compute high-quality paths (such as T-RRT), some even guaranteeing asymptotic optimality (such as RRT*). In this paper, we propose two new sampling-based approaches that combine the underlying principles of RRT* and T-RRT. These algorithms, called T-RRT* and AT-RRT, offer probabilistic completeness and asymptotic optimality guarantees. Results presented on several classes of problems show that they converge faster than RRT* toward the optimal path, especially when the topology of the search space is complex and/or when its dimensionality is high.