English

LEA*: An A* Variant Algorithm with Improved Edge Efficiency for Robot Motion Planning

Robotics 2023-09-20 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In this work, we introduce a new graph search algorithm, lazy edged based A* (LEA*), for robot motion planning. By using an edge queue and exploiting the idea of lazy search, LEA* is optimally vertex efficient similar to A*, and has improved edge efficiency compared to A*. LEA* is simple and easy to implement with minimum modification to A*, resulting in a very small overhead compared to previous lazy search algorithms. We also explore the effect of inflated heuristics, which results in the weighted LEA* (wLEA*). We show that the edge efficiency of wLEA* becomes close to LazySP and, thus is near-optimal. We test LEA* and wLEA* on 2D planning problems and planning of a 7-DOF manipulator. We perform a thorough comparison with previous algorithms by considering sparse, medium, and cluttered random worlds and small, medium, and large graph sizes. Our results show that LEA* and wLEA* are the fastest algorithms to find the plan compared to previous algorithms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.10722,
  title  = {LEA*: An A* Variant Algorithm with Improved Edge Efficiency for Robot Motion Planning},
  author = {Dongliang Zheng and Panagiotis Tsiotras},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.10722},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:26:17.443Z