K-order surrounding roadmaps path planner for robot path planning

Probabilistic roadmaps are commonly used in robot path planning. Most sampling-based path planners often produce poor-quality roadmaps as they focus on improving the speed of constructing roadmaps without paying much attention to the quality. Poor-quality roadmaps can cause problems such as poor-quality paths, time-consuming path searching and failures in the searching. This paper presents a K-order surrounding roadmap (KSR) path planner which constructs a roadmap in an incremental manner. The planner creates a tree while answering a query, selects the part of the tree according to quality measures and adds the part to an existing roadmap which is obtained in the same way when answering the previous queries. The KSR path planner is able to construct high-quality roadmaps in terms of good coverage, high connectivity, provision of alternative paths and small size. Comparison between the KSR path planner and Reconfigurable Random Forest (RRF), an existing incremental path planner, as well as traditional probabilistic roadmap (PRM) path planner shows that the roadmaps constructed using the KSR path planner have higher quality that those that are built by the other planners.