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{arxiv.2206.11977,
title = {Hierarchical Planning with Annotated Skeleton Guidance},
author = {Diane Uwacu and Ananya Yammanuru and Marco Morales and Nancy M. Amato},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.11977},
year = {2022}
}