Expert-guided kinodynamic RRT path planner for non-holonomic robots

Abstract

In this paper, an expert-guided kinodynamic RRT algorithm (EGK-RRT) is presented. It aims to consider how a human pilot would navigate a kinodynamic robot. One of the characteristics of this algorithm is the fact that, unlike the original RRT for kinodynamic systems, it generates deterministic control sequences which can be reproduced as long as the sequence of references (sampled states) are known. Here, the performance of the proposed algorithm is tested against the basic RRT, showing that the EGK-RRT greatly improves in terms of execution speed. In addition to this, the influence of using a visibility check and an inertia estimation in order to select the nearest neighbor is also analyzed, demonstrating that a combination of both factors leads to a better overall performance, both in execution speed and in quality of the generated path.