GART: An environment-guided path planner for robots in crowded environments under kinodynamic constraints

The problem of three-dimensional path planning in obstacle-crowded environments is a challenge (an NP-hard problem), which becomes even more complex when considering environmental uncertainty and system control. Int this paper, we mainly focused on more challenging problem, that is, path planning in obstacle-crowded environments, and we try to find the relation between contact information and obstacle modeling. We proposed a newactive exploring sampling-based algorithm based on rapidly exploring random tree (RRT), namely, guiding attraction-based random tree (GART). GART introduces bidirectional potential field to redistribute each newly sampled state, such that the in-collision samples can be redistributed for extension. Furthermore, dynamic constraints are deployed to establish forward extending region by GART. Thus, GART can ensure kinodynamic reachability as well as smoothness. Theoretical analysis demonstrate that GART is probabilistic complete, and it obtains faster convergence rate because of its redistribution ability. In addition to theoretical analysis, this article provides comparative simulations as well as experiments under typical situations. Results demonstrate that GART has a much better time-efficiency performance than RRT∗, retraction-based RRT, and other referred algorithms when applying redistribution and dynamic constraints on random exploration.