Planning Motion in Environments with Similar Obstacles

Jyh-Ming Lien and Yanyan Lu

Overview

In this work, we investigate solutions to the following question: Given two motion planning problems W1 and W2 with the same robot and similar obstacles, can we reuse the computation from W1 to solve W2 more efficiently? While the answer to this question can find many practical applications, all current motion planners ignore the correspondences between similar environments. Our study shows that by carefully storing and reusing the computation we can gain significant efficiency.