Motion planning in environments with dangerzones

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of path planning for a free-flying object in a (threedimensional) environment that contains both obstacles and so-called dangerzones. The path should (obviously) avoid collisions with the obstacles. The path is allowed to intersect with the dangerzones but this should be avoided as much as possible. We show that, under some mild conditions, a path always exists in which the moving object never completely penetrates the dangerzones. Based on this result we present a probabilistically complete roadmap method that finds such paths. The methods has been implemented and some experimental results are given.