(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008)
van den Berg, Jur; Stilman, Mike; Kuffner, James; Lin, Ming; Manocha, Dinesh
In this paper we study the problem of path planning among movable
obstacles, in which a robot is allowed to move the obstacles if they block the robot's way from a start to a goal position. We make the observation that we can decouple
the computations of the robot motions and the obstacle movements, and present a
probabilistically complete algorithm, something which to date has not been achieved
for this problem. Our algorithm maintains an explicit representation of the robot's
configuration space. We present an efficient implementation for the case of planar,
axis-aligned environments and report experimental results on challenging scenarios.