Octree-Based Hierarchical 3D Pathfinding Optimization of Three-Dimensional Pathfinding

Despite the fact that the problem of pathfinding exists for quite a while, most of the related work is focused on methods that are applicable only in 2D environment. However, there is a demand for methods that can provide a solution for pathfinding tasks in 3D working space. These tasks mostly come from area of robotics and game development, where it is often required to get a solution in real-time. The main problem, besides the lack of appropriate methods, is that in 3D environment the working space size increases greatly in comparison with 2D case, and it becomes harder to construct a precise representation of this space while maintaining low size of search graph. To overcome this, methods that lower graph size, whether explicitly or implicitly, are used. This paper provides a brief review on some of existing approaches, comparison of their effectiveness and presentation a new method of real-time pathfinding in 3D environment that can be helpful in real-time calculations (i.e. game development area). This brief review will be referred to when comparing proposed method with existing ones. A proposed method combines advantages of using octree structure as search graph (such as sparce free space representation) and hierarchical path planning (effective reduction of graph size by clustering). Thus, an appreciable speed-up is achieved.