Feasibility of motion planning on acyclic and strongly connected directed graphs Original Research Article

Motion planning is a fundamental problem of robotics with applications in many areas of computer science and beyond. Its restriction to graphs has been investigated in the literature, for it allows one to concentrate on the combinatorial problem abstracting from geometric considerations. In this paper, we consider motion planning over directed graphs, which are of interest for asymmetric communication networks. Directed graphs generalize undirected graphs, while introducing a new source of complexity to the motion planning problem: moves are not reversible. We first consider the class of acyclic directed graphs and show that the feasibility can be solved in time linear in the product of the number of vertices and the number of arcs. We then turn to strongly connected directed graphs. We first prove a structural theorem for decomposing strongly connected directed graphs into strongly biconnected components. Based on the structural decomposition, we show that the feasibility of motion planning on strongly connected directed graphs can be decided in linear time.