Adaptive Region Boosting method with biased entropy for path planning in changing environment

Path planning in changing environments with difficult regions, such as narrow passages and obstacle boundaries, creates significant challenges. As the obstacles in W-space move frequently, the crowd degree of C-space changes accordingly. Therefore, in order to dynamically improve the sampling quality, it is appreciated for a planner to rapidly approximate the crowd degree of different parts of the C-space, and boost sample densities with them based on their difficulty levels. In this paper, a novel approach called Adaptive Region Boosting (ARB) is proposed to increase the sampling density for difficult areas with different strategies. What's more, a new criterion, called biased entropy, is proposed to evaluate the difficult degree of a region. The new criterion takes into account both temporal and spatial information of a specific C-space region, in order to make a thorough assessment to a local area. Three groups of experiments are conducted based on a dual-manipulator system with 12 DoFs. Experimental results indicate that ARB effectively improves the success rate and outperforms all the other related methods in various dynamical scenarios.