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The design and implementation of theoretically-sound robot motion planning algorithms is challenging. Within the framework of resolution-exact algorithms, it is possible to exploit soft predicates for collision detection. The design of soft predicates is a balancing act between easily implementable predicates and their accuracy/effectivity. In this paper, we focus on the class of planar polygonal rigid robots with arbitrarily complex geometry. We exploit the remarkable decomposability property of soft collision-detection predicates of such robots. We introduce a general technique to produce such a decomposition. If the robot is an m-gon, the complexity of this approach scales linearly in m. This contrasts with the O(m^3) complexity known for exact planners. It follows that we can now routinely produce soft predicates for any rigid polygonal robot. This results in resolution-exact planners for such robots within the general Soft Subdivision Search (SSS) framework. This is a significant advancement in the theory of sound and complete planners for planar robots. We implemented such decomposed predicates in our open-source Core Library. The experiments show that our algorithms are effective, perform in real time on non-trivial environments, and can outperform many sampling-based methods.
@InProceedings{zhou_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2018.73,
author = {Zhou, Bo and Chiang, Yi-Jen and Yap, Chee},
title = {{Soft Subdivision Motion Planning for Complex Planar Robots}},
booktitle = {26th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2018)},
pages = {73:1--73:14},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-081-1},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {112},
editor = {Azar, Yossi and Bast, Hannah and Herman, Grzegorz},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2018.73},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-95361},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2018.73},
annote = {Keywords: Computational Geometry, Algorithmic Motion Planning, Resolution-Exact Algorithms, Soft Predicates, Planar Robots with Complex Geometry}
}