Direct Path Superfacets: An Intermediate Representation for Motion Planning

This paper presents an approach that combines geometry processing with motion planning to enable a robot to efficiently navigate in unstructured environments. The proposed approach relies on a novel oversegmentation method to produce a decomposition of the free space into a set of connected regions. This provides a general and simplified planning layer with navigational routes along which sampling-based motion planning expands a tree of collision-free and dynamically feasible motions to reach the goal. Experiments using robot models with nonlinear dynamics operating in complex environments show significant speedups over related work.