Advanced BIT* (ABIT*): Sampling-Based Planning with Advanced Graph-Search Techniques

Authors

Marlin P. Strub, Jonathan D. Gammell

Year

2020

Preprint

Algorithm

ABIT*

Identifiers

arXiv 2002.06589 DOI 10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9196580

Abstract¶

Path planning is an active area of research essential for many applications in robotics. Popular techniques include graph-based searches and sampling-based planners. These approaches are powerful but have limitations. This paper continues work to combine their strengths and mitigate their limitations using a unified planning paradigm. It does this by viewing the path planning problem as the two subproblems of search and approximation and using advanced graph-search techniques on a sampling-based approximation. This perspective leads to Advanced BIT*. ABIT* combines truncated anytime graph-based searches, such as ATD*, with anytime almost-surely asymptotically optimal sampling-based planners, such as RRT*. This allows it to quickly find initial solutions and then converge towards the optimum in an anytime manner. ABIT* outperforms existing single-query, sampling-based planners on the tested problems in R^(4) and R^(8), and was demonstrated on real-world problems with NASA/JPL-Caltech.