Narrow Results

Path planning is an essential and inevitable problem in robotics. Trapping in local minima and discontinuities often exist in local path planning. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper presents a smooth path planning algorithm based on modified visibility graph. This algorithm consists of three steps: (1) polygons are generated from detected obstacles; (2) a collision-free path is found by simultaneous visibility graph construction and path search by A${}^{\ast }$ (SVGA); (3) the path is smoothed by B-spline curves and particle swarm optimization (PSO). Simulation experiment results show the effectiveness of this algorithm, and a smooth path can be found fleetly.

B-spline curve, especially cubic B-spline curve, has been widely used in CAD area. Sometimes we need to compute a B-spline curve’s control points according to points on it. The problem of computing a cubic B-spline curve’s control points is equivalent to that of solving a linear equation, which can be solved by LU decomposition or Gauss elimination. In this paper, a better algorithm, which makes use of the characteristic of the equation’s coefficient matrix, will be presented.