• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.493-498
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• 2004

A novel approach for path planning of a polygonal robot is presented. Traditional path planners perform extensive geometric searching to find the optimal path or to prove that there is no solution. The computation required to prove that there is no solution is equivalent to exhaustive search of the motion space, which is typically very expensive. Humans seems to use a set of several different path planning strategies to analyse the situation of the obstacles in the environment, and quickly recognize whether the path-planning problem is easy to solve, hard to solve or has no solution. This human path-planning strategies have motivated the development of the presented algorithm that combines qualitative shape reasoning and exhaustive geometric searching to speed up the path planning process. It has three planning stages consisting of identification of no-solution cases based on an enclosure test, a qualitative reasoning stage, and finally a complete search algorithm in case the previous two stages cannot determine of the existence of a solution path.