Recent developments in motion planning

Abstract

Motion planning is becoming an important topic in many application areas, ranging from robotics to virtual environments and games. In this paper I review some recent results in motion planning, concentrating on the probabilistic roadmap approach that has proven to be very successful for many motion planning problems. After a brief description of the approach I indicate how the technique can be applied to various motion planning problems. Next I give a number of global techniques for improving the approach, and finally I describe some recent results on improving the quality of the resulting motions.