Authors: Diane Uwacu, Ananya Yammanuru, Marco Morales, Nancy M. Amato

Venue: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2022.3196885
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Abstract:
We present a hierarchical skeleton-guided motion planning algorithm to guide mobile robots. A good skeleton maps the connectivity of the subspace of c-space containing significant degrees of freedom and is able to guide the planner to find the desired solutions fast. However, sometimes the skeleton does not closely represent the free c-space, which often misleads current skeleton-guided planners. The hierarchical skeleton-guided planning strategy gradually relaxes its reliance on the workspace skeleton as C-space is sampled, thereby incrementally returning a sub-optimal path, a feature that is not guaranteed in the standard skeleton-guided algorithm. Experimental comparisons to the standard skeleton guided planners and other lazy planning strategies show significant improvement in roadmap construction run time while maintaining path quality for multi-query problems in cluttered environments. 

@article{Uwacu-hpwasg-2022, 
 author = {Uwacu, Diane and Yammanuru, Ananya and Morales, Marco and Amato, Nancy M.}, 
 doi = {10.1109/LRA.2022.3196885}, 
 journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters}, 
 number = {4}, 
 pages = {11055-11061}, 
 title = {Hierarchical Planning With Annotated Skeleton Guidance}, 
 volume = {7}, 
 year = {2022} 
}