Fast and Almost Optimal Any-Angle Pathfinding Using the 2k Neighborhoods

Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search, 10

Volume

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2017): Tenth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search

Short Papers

Any-angle path finding on grids is an important problem with applications in autonomous robot navigation. In this paper, we show that a well-known pre-processing technique, namely subgoal graphs, originally proposed for (non any-angle) 8-connected grids, can be straightforwardly adapted to the 2k neighborhoods, a family of neighborhoods that allow an increasing number of movements (and angles) as k is increased. This observation yields a pathfinder that computes 2k-optimal paths very quickly. Compared to ANYA, an optimal true any-angle planner, over a variety of benchmarks, our planner is one order of magnitude faster while being less than 0.0005% suboptimal. Important to our planner's performance was the development of an iterative 2k heuristic, linear in k, which is also a contribution of this paper.

10.1609/socs.v8i1.18442