mobile robots

motion planner

obstacles

modular robots

robot navigation

mobile sensor

sampling-based motion

optimal path

trajectory generation

Annual review of control, robotics, and autonomous systems

Motion planning is a fundamental problem in autonomous robotics that requires finding a path to a specified goal that avoids obstacles and takes into account a robot's limitations and constraints. It is often desirable for this path to also optimize a cost function, such as path length. Formal path-quality guarantees for continuously valued search spaces are an active area of research interest. Recent results have proven that some sampling-based planning methods probabilistically converge toward the optimal solution as computational effort approaches infinity. This article summarizes the assumptions behind these popular asymptotically optimal techniques and provides an introduction to the significant ongoing research on this topic.

Asymptotically Optimal Sampling-Based Motion Planning Methods