A Continuous Collision Checking Method for Non-holonomic Path Planning in Narrow Environments

Abstract

This paper presents a new method of collision checking for non-holonomic dynamical systems in environments with narrow passages. This new method is compared with alternative approaches for collision checking, which are widely used in conjunction with different path planners. All methods are evaluated in a systematic simulation study with numerous scenarios, using two of the most popular path planning methods, Hybrid A* and RRT*. On the one hand, the results show that the new collision checking approach can manage the narrow passages better than the compared methods. On the other hand, its computation time can be longer or shorter, depending on the particular scenario.