Optimal Path Planning Using Critical Points

A lot of path planning algorithms have been developed to find the collision-free path with minimum cost. But most of them require complicated computations. In this paper, a thinning method, which is one of the image processing schemes, was adopted to simplify the path planning procedure. In addition, critical points are used to find the shortest-distance path among all possible paths from the start to the goal point. Since the critical points contain the information on the neighboring paths, a new path can be quickly obtained on the map even when the start and goal points change. To investigate the validity of the proposed algorithm, various simulations have been performed for the environment where the obstacles with arbitrary shapes exist. It is shown that the optimal paths can be found with relative easiness.