Numerical potential field techniques for robot path planning

Abstract

The authors investigate a path planning approach that consists of concurrently building and searching a graph connecting the local minima of a numerical potential field defined over the robot's configuration space. They describe techniques for constructing 'good' potentials and efficient methods for dealing with the local minima of these functions. These techniques have been implemented in fast planners that can deal with single and/or multiple robot systems with few and/or many degrees of freedom. Some experimental results with these planners are described.