We present a new approach to path planning, called the "Ariadne's clew algorithm". It is designed to find paths in high-dimensional continuous spaces and applies to robots with many degrees of freedom in static, as well as dynamic environments - ones where obstacles may move. The Ariadne's clew algorithm comprises two sub-algorithms, called Search and Explore, applied in an interleaved manner. Explore builds a representation of the accessible space while Search looks for the target. Both are posed as optimization problems. We describe a real implementation of the algorithm to plan paths for a six degrees of freedom arm in a dynamic environment where another six degrees of freedom arm is used as a moving obstacle. Experimental results show that a path is found in about one second without any pre-processing.
@article{arxiv.1105.5440,
title = {The Ariadne's Clew Algorithm},
author = {J. M. Ahuactzin and P. Bessiere and E. Mazer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.5440},
year = {2011}
}